Best Actor – Page 4 – This Had Oscar Buzz

167 – The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

We’ll get you a red cap and a speedo for this week’s episode, becuase we’re talking about Wes Anderson for the first time with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The follow-up to Anderson’s first Oscar-nominated film The Royal Tenenbaums put Bill Murray front and center in the year after Murray almost won Best Actor for Lost in Translation. But critics were far less kind to this film than Anderson’s previous efforts (it remains his only rotten movie on RT), and voters looking to reward Murray for his previous loss were met with a more caustic and off-putting character than hid lauded “sad Murray” era.

This episode, we look back at how Murray was shockingly snubbed for Anderson’s Rushmore and the ebbs and flows of Anderson’s career in relation to audience/critic perceptions. And since no performance in a Wes Anderson film has ever landed an Oscar nomination, we pick our top 5 performances in his films we think are most deserving.

Topics also include Seu Jorge’s David Bowie covers in Portuguese, whether or not Ray is appropriately categorized as a musical, and which performance in The French Dispatch has the best chance at a nomination.

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161 – The Mule

Many of Clint Eastwood’s most recent films have arrived in quick turnaround, going from announcement to filming to release in a head-spinningly short amount of time. In 2018, he had one of his fastest productions ever with The Mule, a story of an 80-year-old man estranged from his family who takes on a job hauling drugs across the border in his pickup truck. Inspired partly by a true story, the film’s sprint to theatres set expectations that it might be another of Eastwood’s successful late season arrivals like Million Dollar Baby. The result was a Christmas season box office success, but a film that ultimately didn’t attempt much of an awards campaign to make voters take notice.

This episode, we don’t mince words about how we feel about the film’s offensive stereotypes and clunky pseudo-comic character study. We get into Bradley Cooper reuniting with Eastwood for a thankless role here in the same season as his triumph with A Star Is Born, and how Cooper shockingly missed out on becoming the season’s frontrunner. And we discuss the film’s trolling tactics, the work of screenwriter Nick Schenk, and the free pass the film received by critics.

Topics also include an egregiously underused Dianne Wiest, flirting at flower conventions, and Eastwood grumbling the word “internet.”

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148 – Concussion

Finally, we are telling the truth! In 2015, Will Smith took on another biopic with Concussion as Dr. Bennett Omalu, the forensic pathologist whose research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy experienced by football players found opposition with the NFL. After premiering at AFI Fest, the film received middling reviews and opened on Christmas Day only to be gobbled up by the storm that was The Force Awakens, resulting in one of Smith’s paltriest openings.

Will Smith’s strong performance landed him a Golden Globe nomination, but missed out of the Oscar lineup on nomination day, becoming one of the most cited performances in Oscar So White conversation. This episode, we discuss whether or the film goes easy on the NFL and their attempts to silence Dr. Omalu, and how it takes on toxic masculinity in football culture at large. We also look at the abysmal 2015 Best Actor race, how this film showed up in the Sony hack, and how Albert Brooks can sell a crass line about his anatomy.

Topics also include 5 disk CD changer technology, how Avatar 2 is just Mare of Easttown 2, and Concussion’s MTV Movie Award nominations.

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105 – Somewhere (with George Civeris)

After reaching Oscar success in 2003 with Lost in Transalation, Sofia Coppola has stayed mostly on the fringes of Oscar conversations with her distinct but understated filmography. This week, comedian and StraightioLab cohost George Civeris joins us to look back at perhaps her quietest film, 2010′s Somewhere. Starring Stephen Dorff as a B-movie star and Elle Fanning as his preteen daughter visiting him at his home at the Chateau Marmont, the film received a muted release at the end of the year and has since gained more ardant fans of its subdued emotional insight.

We discuss the film’s triumph and mishegoss at the Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded the Golden Lion by a jury led by Coppola’s friend Quentin Tarantino. We also look at Coppola’s frequently revisited portraits of privilege, her exceptional taste in song choices, and her performance in The Godfather Part III.

Other topics include the 2010 Best Actor lineup, newspaper ads as a bygone Oscar campaign tool / gay recruitment tool, and Britney Spears’ “Everytime” video.

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101 – Flawless

Philip Seymour Hoffman had a breakout 1999, winning critics prizes for performances in two films that just missed the Best Picture cut but landed his flashier costars with Supporting Actor nominations: Magnolia and The Talented Mr. Ripley. But this week, we’re discussing another less-praised film of his that year that nevertheless landed him a Lead Actor nomination at SAG: Joel Schumacher’s Flawless.

Hoffman stars in the film as drag performer and trans woman Rusty, who starts singing lessons with his bigot ex-cop neighbor Walt (Robert DeNiro) to help him recover from a stroke that was onset by violence in their building. This episode, we talk about the Oscar momentum Hoffman built over several beloved performances before his steamroll to a win for Capote. We also discuss the recently departed Schumacher, including battling over his Batman films and looking at his remarkable range of movies (and their quality).

Topics also include the film’s spotty relationship with trans and queer representation, DeNiro’s long gap between nominations post-Cape Fear, and cufflink guns.

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089 – The Rainmaker

Francis Ford Coppola is a legendary director among Oscar lore thanks to the Corleone family, and this week’s episode pairs him with a name that resulted in much ‘90s cinematic prestige: John Grisham. After a string of hit adaptations that danced with major Oscar consideration, Coppola took his shot at Grisham’s The Rainmaker. But despite good reviews (and a Globe nomination for supporting actor Jon Voight), the film earned mild box office that halted the Grisham hot streak. Led by an emerging Matt Damon, the film was also overshadowed just one month later by the release of Good Will Hunting.

This episode, we revisit the box office success and Oscar near-success of films adapted by the mega-popular works of the legal thriller / airport staple John Grisham. We also discuss Coppola’s late career phase of largely unseen and unheralded films, the stacked 1997 Best Actor field, and The Rainmaker’s bursting cast list of glorified cameos and supporting players.

And this episode brings the return of two of our favorite topics: Claire Danes and the Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview.

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088 – Alfie (with Griffin Newman)

We’re taking it back to Jude Law’s infamously busy 2004 this week and we’ve got a special guest to help dissect it. Actor and cohost of the Blank Check with Griffin and David podcast Griffin Newman joins us to discuss Alfie, the modernized remake of the 1966 Best Picture nominee with Law filling Michael Caine’s previously star-making shoes.

In a 2004 that also filled his resume with Closer, I Heart Huckabees, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Alfie was was one that was most bent on turning Law into a bonafide movie star – and the biggest bomb with audiences and critics. Not helped by an updated take that is significantly more shallow than the original, this film suffered from a star overexposed to audiences both onscreen and in the tabloids. This episode, we look at Law’s quick turnaround from omnipresence to punchline, and his eventual reemergence as a character actor.

We also take a look back at the career of director Charles Shyer and his quality drop-off after the end of his personal and creative partnership with Nancy Meyers, and the one-two punch of Chris Rock and Sean Penn commenting on Law at the Oscars. Topics also include the era of metrosexuality, London as a terrible stand-in for New York City, and Beyoncé performing three Original Song nominees at the Oscars.

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087 – The Bucket List

This week, we’re crossing a big one off our list. Arriving at the tail end of a very serious-minded 2007, Rob Reiner gave us The Bucket List, a globetrotting buddy comedy about two eldery men with cancer starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Thanks to its two major stars and an early Best Of mention from the National Board of Review, this one arrived in Oscar consideration but was ultimately never taken seriously due to a slate of poor reviews and its punchline status.

This episode, we take a look at Reiner’s directorial career that has been defined by the low points (such as North) while his best films often get attributed moreso to his collaborators. We also discuss our personal choices for the Best Actor of 2007, a field so competitive that Nicholson and Freeman were never likely to crack.

Topics also include epic pans from Roger Ebert, A Few Good Men as a formative cinematic experience, and Himalayan mountaineer Sean Hayes.

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082 – Stranger Than Fiction (with Kevin Jacobsen)

This week we’re returning to a subject that never fails to summon Oscar buzz: comedic actors going dramatic. For this round, we welcome And The Runner Up Is host and writer for Gold Derby Kevin Jacobsen to discuss 2006′s Stranger Than Fiction. The high-concept seriocomedy starred Will Ferrell in his first major attempt at a dramatic role as Harold Crick, a man who hears a voice narrating his life and predicting his imminent demise. That voice belongs to an author played by Emma Thompson, with Harold being the subject of her next masterpiece.

But it wasn’t just Ferrell’s leap into drama that spelled Stranger Than Fiction’s Oscar potential. The film was directed by Marc Forster – already a rising Oscar commodity after directing Halle Berry to her win and following that up with Finding Neverland – with buzzed new screenwriter Zach Helm chasing the in-vogue absurdity of Charlie Kaufman. Despite good reviews, the film didn’t fully achieve the potential of its premise and was overshadowed by other counterprogramming options to Oscar’s brooding 2006.

This episode, we take a look back at the diminishing Oscar returns for Marc Forster and how Sacha Baron Cohen and Borat surprisingly stole this film’s thunder. Topics also include Amy Pascal at awards shows, films that made us look at film more critically, and canonical This Had Oscar Buzz superfan Don Gummer.

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081 – Finding Forrester

After the disasterous reception to his shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, Gus Van Sant returned to territory closer to his previous Oscar success with 2000′s Finding Forrester. Another tale of a prodigy in academia, the film follows newcomer Rob Brown as a young writer who stumbles into the guidance of a famed recluse writer William Forrester, played by a late career Sean Connery.

Told in tropes made very familiar by the likes of Dead Poets Society and Scent of a Woman, Finding Forrester is ultimately a very dull version of a mentor/pupil story. And while the film’s moderate box office success made for a small comeback for Van Sant, stiff competition and a late release kept Sean Connery out of the Best Actor race. Now the film is most remembered for its catchphrase, crowed into consciousness in Connery’s brogue: “You’re the man now, dog!”

This episode, we also discuss Connery’s string of post-Oscar hits throughout the 90s and Van Sant’s tough-to-pin-down filmography. Topics also include Oscar presenters who make the envelope reveal more about themselves than the winner, Busta Rhymes, and our favorite pottymouth Shohreh Aghdashloo.

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