and the oscar goes to...

I was pleased, for the most part, to see which actors and movies were nominated for Academy Awards this morning. In the same weekend last month, I saw both Capote and Junebug and had the distinct feeling that I was witnessing a couple of the best supporting performances ever from both Catherine Keener and Amy Adams. And this after already being wowed by Michelle Williams in Brokeback Mountain a few weeks earlier. I think the Best Supporting Actress category will give the Best Actor category a run for its money for the most pins-and-needles on awards night.

Crash, on the other hand, is a bit of quandary for me. There were many strong performances in the movie, especially Matt Dillon and a surprisingly seriously bitchy Sandra Bullock. But the plot, oh the plot! It was the kind of plot that Hollywood thinks is clever and poignant, especially when the writers and producers are either young or coked up or making too many films to step back and criticize their own work. Honestly, I am willing to be surprised and moved when lives intersect in a good complex story, but the intersecting in Crash became ridiculous. People in the theater began to laugh long before the last of the intersections were revealed. I half expected to discover that the person in the row behind me and the theater usher had also been at the tables next to me at dinner earlier and would later be the ones who stole my cab and hired me for freelance work the next day. I kept thinking, "Okay, okay, I get the point! As human beings we're all interconnected! Tell me a little more about what that means. Be a little more subtle and nuanced, would ya!"

Then again, subtlety and nuance aren't Hollywood's strong suit. That's why I'm thankful they have Ang Lee (Hulk notwithstanding). Brokeback Mountain haunted me for several weeks after I saw the movie and read the short story by Annie Proulx on which it was based. I am very critical of gay movies. Most of them disappoint me to no end. Gay film makers seem to be too caught up in the fact that they're making a gay film to be self-critical. The plots and characters are often unbelievable or preachy or übertragic. Even when gay characters are introduced into mainstream films that are not particularly gay themed, they are usually cookie-cutter representations of something--the really, really good gay guy, the loveable-but-lonely friend, the perfect adoptive parent, the closet freak, the tragic queen with the heart of gold, the sexy hip lesbian--and their humanity crumbles under the weight. I never believe it.

What worked for me about Brokeback was that the story seemed very, very true for these two men. They weren't icons--not gay icons or Old West icons or early '60s icons--and they didn't have to bear the weight of any of that for me. They easily could have been presented as any one of these, but they weren't. The movie simply made me believed that life happened this way for the two of them and I felt that pathos. This is in part because the short story was written in this manner. And to a large part, it is because Ang Lee, as he did in The Ice Storm, kept it subtle and emotionally controlled. But I think Jake Gyllenhaal and especially Heath Ledger's performances are what made the film honest and true. I have known men out West so much like each of their characters, gay or straight, that there was a knot in my stomach, and the knot would have been there even without the gay theme.

Ledger's subtle performance would be a shoe in for the Best Actor award if it weren't for Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote. I'm just old enough to have seen Truman Capote on television talk shows in the '60s and I was blown away by Hoffman in the film. Even the tiniest details, like the way he moved his upper lift in one moment of the film, made me feel like I had seen a ghost. I believe that Hoffman will walk away with one more award on Oscar night, not only because of this performance, but for every performance he has done over the past decade and half. A true character actor in every sense of the word, his performances in films like Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, Magnolia, Flawless, Almost Famous, Cold Mountain, and now Capote, to name a few, are unforgettable. I think Hoffman's peers in the movie industry really love having this opportunity to award him for his talent and hard work, and this performance is very worthy of it.