By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
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.