..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

20 WEEKS TO GO
The Year Of The Actor

"That's more of an actor's movie, isn't it?"

I've heard a lot of this from spinners and pickers this year… and with good reason. Of the 15 or 16 serious Best Picture contenders, only about a third (Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha, The New World, The Constant Gardener, and maybe Jarhead and Syriana) are movies driven by directors or the power of the story and are not first and foremost "actor's movies."

This is not to discount the directors, writers, crews, and even true-life stories told in the majority of films. Not at all. And when you are a writer-director, like Woody Allen or Tom Bezucha or Stephen Gaghan or Paul Haggis, those movies are really worthy of a possessive credit.

Good God, Mel Brooks won an Oscar for the original screenplay of The Producers 37 years ago! But the simple reality is that no matter how great the conceit of the show, The Producers: The Musical will be an Oscar nominee only if Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman and the rest of the gang hit it out of the park. (Ironically, director nominee for Chicago, Rob Marshall, is the director of one of those films in which the actors are subservient to the structure this time out.)

Last year, Ray was the one Best Picture nominee that was really built on a central performance or performances beyond all else. Even Million Dollar Baby, which was a three-actor show, found its weight in its story, above and beyond three tremendous performances.

This year, you have Phoenix & Witherspoon making the great love story of Johnny and June Carter Cash work… Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins are this year's Hope & Crosby (though Hope was never nominated)… Capote is about Phil Hoffman… All The King's Men relies on Sean Penn's ability to burn down the house… Ang Lee's choice of quiet storytelling allows Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams to dominate Brokeback Mountain… Cillian Murphy is Breakfast on Pluto… and then there are the pure ensembles of Crash and The Family Stone.

Good performances are not the story of this season. GREAT performances are the driving force.

Of course, every year at the Oscars, in its way, is the Year of the Actor. The members of that branch are by far the dominant clique, making up more than 20% of the voting membership.

In this year's list of contenders, good actors have hurdles to deal with if their pictures are going to get to Best Picture. Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li are worldwide stars… but they aren't American celebrities and Yeoh is the only one who can chat easily with the press and voters over cocktails. They have no built-in constituency. So the movie has to be a little better than it otherwise might.

The New World is built around the underage Q'orianka Kilcher more so than Colin Farrell. New Line did great last year with Catalina Sandino Moreno, who was also young and language-challenged. But they didn't get a Best Picture nod for their movie either..

On Munich, every awards conversation inevitably contains three sentences. "Eric Bana? You really think so? Eric Bana?" Unlike many, my first exposure to Bana was his first film, Chopper. And few people know that Bana started his performance career as a stand-up comic, making the leap to actor with great skill. So I have few doubts about his ability. And in fact, that doubt about Bana could come back and be a major asset for Munich is his performance takes people by surprise.

Fernando Meirelles' skillful images are more dominant than any other part of The Constant Gardener, but without the daring work of Rachel Weisz, Ralph Fiennes' most quiet, internalized performance to date, and a spectacular supporting cast of veteran actors, it would have all been for not.

For whatever reasons, there just aren't a boatload of heavyweight awards-type movies… even though there are a whole lot of big studio movies in the battle. And even in the face of that, smart guys like David Ansen are saying, "Look at these great indies!"

Only two true indies have candidates in the race this year, Lions Gate with Crash and the newly independent The Weinstein Company with Mrs. Henderson Presents. And even amongst the Dependents, Sony Classics has two candidates and Focus Features has two. If, as I am predicting now, two of the five Best Picture nominees come from indies/dependents, it will be a great achievement indeed. And the three top candidates for those two slots? Films dominated by Judi Dench, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Heath Ledger.

Actors. It's their year.

 

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