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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, February 20th, 2006 - Comments Off on This Week in Shameless Oscar Campaigning: The Best Actor Race
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This Week in Shameless Oscar Campaigning: The Best Actor Race


With less than two weeks to go before the world stops, shudders and succumbs to a full-blown Oscar-night paralysis, I am struggling with the encroaching impression that in the sprint to claim this year’s Best Actor prize, Capote‘s Philip Seymour Hoffman has pulled ahead of Brokeback Mountain‘s Heath Ledger for good.
Which sucks, really–Capote is boring and Hoffman overacts–but the evidence does not lie. Take the Hoffman/Steve Kroft quickie last night on 60 Minutes–the most sensitive, personal portions of which made the PR rounds last week and only got more… penetrating when viewed in their entirety:

“Researching this work has changed my life, it’s altered my point of view about almost everything,” says Hoffman. “What is it? What is his personality? What makes him tick? I knew that deep down inside I had to understand it for myself in some personal way.”

Asked how he identified with Capote, Hoffman says, “The ambition, the drive, the wanting to be the center of attention, the wanting to succeed. … They’re all inside me somewhere.”

Compare Hoffman’s sexy backswing to that of the adorably ambivalent and nerve-addled Ledger, on whose behalf The Reeler has received a series of anonymous “reader” e-mails pushing their boy to the finish line. To wit:

“After seeing Brokeback Mountain and Capote, I would be very disappointed if Academy voters did not choose the very moving portrayal of Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. Nothing against Philip Seymour Hoffman, but his performance is merely a caricature, copying the mannerisms of a strange man. A performance that does not have the soul or the full out emotion that Heath Ledger gives. … If voters truly have seen all of the performances for best actor, I can’t see them voting any other way than for Heath Ledger as best actor of the year.”

Or how about this note, which came over hours before Ledger’s Brokeback co-star (and fellow Oscar nominee) Jake Gyllenhaal claimed a British Academy Award for his role as Jack Twist:

“If the Academy are as credible as we all assume they are they would reward these two fine actors to taking on these characters that as film historians years from now would look upon them as the true turning point in Hollywood and the enterntainment industry as a whole in accepting homosexuality.

“Rarely does this happen where the best performances of the year are also the most courageous. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal should win Oscars because of this.”

OK, Focus Features, enough already. As much as I appreciate you keeping me in the loop, the betting man in me says that no publicity-monkey mass mailings are going to supersede a perfectly timed and lubed exotic massage from 60 Minutes. It is too late in the game, unless some exquisite rope-a-dope strategy has you priming a feral Barbara Walters in some dank downtown closet for an 11th-hour Ledger confessional. And those ballots have to be in a week from tomorrow. I am rooting for you, but the nuclear option needs your attention sooner than later, and believe me–my mailbag ain’t it.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon