Jeffery Wright: American Fiction
Paul Giamatti: The Holdovers
Bradley Cooper: Maestro
Cillian Murphy: Oppenheimer (winner)
Colman Domingo: Rustin
What’s Missing
I often get the feeling that a great deal of actors and performances get ignored come award season because of who the actor is, not because of the actual performance. It’s as if we only have room for one or two career resurrections now and again (see Brenan Fraser and Ke Huy Kwan from a couple of years ago), and the rest are just...well, we don’t trust the performer. A case in point is Zac Efron in The Iron Claw, a creditable performance and certainly more memorable than at least one actual nominee. Let’s get rid of the obvious no-gos from this year, meaning the genres that don’t get nominations. For this year, that would include Alexander Skarsgård in Infinity Pool, David Dastmalchian in Late Night With the Devil, and John Boyega in They Cloned Tyrone. I genuinely expected to see nominations for Timothée Chalamet in Wonka and Leonardo DiCaprio for Killers of the Flower Moon. Teo Yoo in Past Lives would have been an interesting choice, but it’s really Greta Lee’s movie. The long shot for me, but someone I would certainly include, is Paul Dano in Dumb Money.
Weeding through the Nominees
5. Bradley Cooper keeps getting nominated for Oscars and I keep wondering why. I have nothing against him, but I never think he has turned in one of the five best performances in a given year. He’s fine, serviceable, but that shouldn’t be enough for an Oscar nomination, even in what feels a little bit like a down year for the category. In this case, though, my problem isn’t Cooper; it’s the movie. Maestro is a relatively standard biopic, and while it’s fine, it’s also nothing really that special. For whatever reason, the Academy decided to like it and award it more nominations than it deserved. And here we are, with it once again coming in fifth.
4. While I do feel like this was a down year overall, I would probably keep four of them, and it’s a year that feels like most of the nominations belong in second place. I don’t know that I want to put anyone in fourth place, but I have to, and so I’m going with Jeffrey Wright, but I don’t feel good about it. I think I might be punishing Wright here for what I feel are problems with the movie, specifically that there’s a lot here that feels like it’s been tacked on and isn’t really plot-relevant. Wright is very good in this role, and I think ultimately I have him in fourth because I like the other performances a little better.
3. Colman Domingo is the best part of Rustin. This is probably my least favorite film of the five nominations, but Domingo is so very much the best part of the film that I think the nomination is warranted. I really want this film to be better than it is, and in that respect, I might well be punishing Domingo here by not placing him higher. In a biopic-heavy year for this category, Colman Domingo managed to be at least the second-most interesting real-world character depicted. I wouldn’t object terribly to a suggestion that he deserves to be higher on the list, even if I can’t get him there.
My Choices
2. It wasn’t a shock when Cillian Murphy won for his work on Oppenheimer. It was the film that gathered all of the critical acclaim come the end of the year and it had all of the momentum. To be fair, I am a fan of Murphy and I tend to like his work in general. I won’t say he was “due” for the win, but he is excellent in the role. The truth is that Oppenheimer is an “important” film more than anything else, and because of that, there’s a great deal attached to it. It’s not a movie I want to watch again. While it is an important film in the classic sense, I liked other movies a lot more. Murphy is an acceptable winner, but he’s not my choice.
1. Of all of these nominated movies, I liked The Holdovers the best, and not by a small margin. Paul Giamatti has the ability to play a very particular type of person, a man beset by life’s trials and worries and crushed under the weight of them better than anyone else can. There’s something eminently hangdog and pitiable in the man, and when he’s given good material like this, there’s no one better. I don’t think there was anything that was going to get in the way of the steamroller that Oppenheimer became, but he’d have been the choice I’d have gone with almost every time.
Final Analysis
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