Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 2009

The Contenders:

Jeff Bridges: Crazy Heart (winner)
Jeremy Renner: The Hurt Locker
Morgan Freeman: Invictus
Colin Firth: A Single Man
George Clooney: Up in the Air

Falling for Flying

Film: Crazy Heart
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

So it’s Oscar night and while I watch and live-tweet the awards (something I’ve literally never done before), I’m writing up Crazy Heart during the commercials. For a blog like this one that focuses on a few Oscar categories, tonight is akin to Super Bowl Sunday. I’m hoping that I’ll finish this before the end of the ceremony. Since I don’t care a great deal about the musical numbers, I might write through those as well.

Crazy Heart feels like a movie I’ve seen before, and when Robert Duvall shows up near the end of the film, I realized it was because Crazy Heart is a hell of a lot like Tender Mercies. In Tender Mercies, Duvall plays an aging, alcoholic country music performer on the outs desperately looking for love and meaning. In Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges plays an aging, alcoholic country music performer on the outs desperately looking for love and meaning.