Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1997

The Contenders:

Donnie Brasco
L.A. Confidential (winner)
The Sweet Hereafter
Wag the Dog
The Wings of the Dove

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1997

The Contenders:

Robert Duvall: The Apostle
Jack Nicholson: As Good as it Gets (winner)
Matt Damon: Good Will Hunting
Peter Fonda: Ulee’s Gold
Dustin Hoffman: Wag the Dog

Shake Your Booty

Film: Wag the Dog
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

In the movie Angel Heart, Robert De Niro essentially plays Satan. He’s also played a laundry list of thugs, hitmen, and mob bosses. I bring that up, because it’s entirely possible that he has never played a darker character than he does in Wag the Dog. That this film is a comedy only enhances De Niro’s genial evil in it. If that sounds like I’m complaining, I apologize. The fact that De Niro’s character is so likable and amiable makes it easy to ignore the fact that he is also terrifying. Once it’s realized exactly how scary he is, the fact that he seems so decent only makes him more evil.

Wag the Dog is a political drama/comedy that is also one of those great examples of life imitating art. In the film, the sitting president is implicated in a sex scandal a couple of weeks before his potential re-election. This causes his team to go into overdrive to create a different news story to take the media feeding frenzy off the sex scandal. Wag the Dog was well into production when the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal broke, and when that scandal was followed in short order by the bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory, well, it was hard to prevent comparisons.