Tonight's edition of Friday Night at the Movies was written by chingchongchinaman.
Among the 2008 Oscar nominations are these in the 4 acting categories:
Best Actor: Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), Sean Penn (Milk)
Best Supporting Actor: Josh Brolin (Milk)
The reason for singling out these 3 nominees from the total of 20 is that they're all for portrayals of real-life historical figures. In the back of my head, I thought that I'd detected a trend in the Academy voting in the last several years for giving the acting awards to what seemed like a high proportion of these portrayals of real-life people. More, possibly pointless, ruminations on this below the flip....
First, though, to see whether my perception matches reality (since we are supposed to be the reality-based community, after all), I trawled through the acting nominations since 1996 (explanation of year choice later). I collated the artists over the 12 years between 1996-2007 who won their Oscars for portrayals of real-life people:
Best Actor:
* 1996: Geoffrey Rush, Shine (as David Helfgott)
* 2002: Adrien Brody, The Pianist (as Wladyslaw Szpilman)
* 2004: Jamie Foxx, Ray (as Ray Charles)
* 2005: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote (as Truman Capote)
* 2006: Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland (as Idi Amin}
Best Actress:
* 1999: Hilary Swank, Boys Don't Cry (as Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon)
* 2000: Julia Roberts, Erin Brockovich (in the title role)
* 2002: Nicole Kidman, The Hours (as Virginia Woolf)
* 2003: Charlize Theron, Monster (as Aileen Wuornos)
* 2005: Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line (as June Carter)
* 2006: Helen Mirren, The Queen (as HRH Queen Elizabeth II)
* 2007: Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose (as Edith Piaf)
Best Supporting Actor:
* 2001: Jim Broadbent, Iris (as John Bayley)
Best Supporting Actress:
* 1998: Judi Dench, Shakespeare in Love (as HRH Queen Elizabeth I)
* 2000: Marcia Gay Harden, Pollock (as Lee Krasner)
* 2001: Jennifer Connelly, A Beautiful Mind (as Alicia Nash)
* 2004: Cate Blanchett, The Aviator (as Katharine Hepburn)
So, out of 48 nominations over that period, 17 winners were for film depictions of real historical figures. For the record:
(a) The quick count over the previous 12 years, 1984-1995, is 9 acting Oscars for portrayals of real-life people.
(b) For the period before that, 1972-1983, 10 such acting Oscars.
I had chosen 1996 as a reference point specifically because of the Oscar to Geoffrey Rush for Shine. What bothered me about him winning the Oscar involved a bunch of factors:
(1) He was only in the film for maybe 20-25 minutes, out of a total running time of 105 minutes.
(2) In spite that limited running time, his performance was basically "one-note" (pun unintended, given the plot of the movie) and not very varied. Tremendously accurate, to be sure, as far as I can tell, and a tribute to GR's skill at portraying Helfgott on film.
(3) Furthermore, GR was nominated in the Best Actor category, not Best Supporting Actor, which is especially galling because that Noah Taylor, who played the younger David Helfgott, had much more screen time and was equally excellent, on different terms, but was totally shut out of the nominations.
This is not a slam on Geoffrey Rush as an actor. He's a fine actor and I've liked his work in the other films of his that I've seen. It's more of a vent at the Academy, and the movie markerters and distributors that hyped one actor at the expense of another, for making distorted nominations and choices for the Oscars at times.
What I thought I was seeing in the Oscars, as another way of stating that trend initially stated, was almost a trend toward rewarding actors for mimicry, for recreating real-life people instead of taking fictional characters and giving them lives of their own, without referring to past film, TV or audio records to imitate. This trend is most pronounced in the nominees for Best Actress, of the four categories, over the past dozen years prior to 2008. Hollywood has a reputation for not coming up with good parts for women in its product, as Hollywood still seems pretty much testosterone-dominated in terms of plot and casting. It's almost as if filmmakers have to reach back to historical figures to come up with interesting female film characters, because they have trouble coming up with interesting original fictional characters of their own. Of course, this year happily breaks that pattern, at least among the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories, since they're all based on fictional characters.
Anyway, just something to think about, since Friday Night at the Movies had been on perhaps unintentional hiatus for a few weeks. Plus the #1 (?) is for the possibility that future FNatM's may also discuss other facets of the 2008 Oscar nominations. The DK film forum below is yours.....
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