Forest Fires Me Up!

Well, it looks like the good shepherd’s chances for Oscar have departed. But Matt is such a good sport about it all, I'm sure he's applauding the other nominees right this very minute! As brilliant as Matt was as Colin Sullivan, the Academy just didn’t love him as much as they loved Leo’s accent, O’Toole’s womanizing, Gosling’s drug habit or the Fresh Prince’s slightly graying hair.

The actor everyone seems to agree will be the one to take home the gold statue this year is Forest Whitaker, whose amazingly nuanced performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland certainly threw me for a loop. From his first speech in front of a cheering crowd, where he insisted he was one of them, to his last speech in front of a brutally beaten man, where he insisted justice be meted out the same way it was in the village he came from, Mr. Whitaker’s performance is never less than fully realized. In one scene, an advisor is berated for not disagreeing with the dictator on the subject of deporting 50,000 Asians from Uganda (because things have turned out rather worse than he had hoped), and when the advisor reminds Mr. Amin that he did disagree, Amin says “But you did not persuade me.” In that scene, Mr. Whitaker persuaded me there was no one else who could have played this role as well. The charm, the passion, the intimidation, all the elements that brought Amin to power and led to his downfall were beautifully realized by Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland. Even if Matt were nominated for his performance in The Departed, I believe I’d still have to vote for Forest Whitaker for this year’s Achievement by a Leading Actor in a Motion Picture award. That’s how good he was!

As for Matt, he’s been talking about what a wonderful year he’s had, working with both Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. He’s earned fine reviews for his performance in The Good Shepherd, some saying he deserved an Oscar nod for his quiet fortitude. I still feel he wasn’t quite right for the role, but it’s nice to see him in glasses for a change. Of course, I’ve been one of the biggest supporters of his work in The Departed, spreading the word everywhere I can what a terrific job he did portraying someone so totally foreign to his own personality. That’s why they call it “acting” after all, right?

Had I the opportunity to vote for nominations this year, I might have chosen DiCaprio and Damon as Lead Actors for The Departed and Aaron Eckhart for his charming cad in Thank You For Smoking. Or I might have chosen Patrick Wilson’s behind, as it pleased me as much in Little Children as it did in the HBO presentation of Angels in America, maybe more so, since it was seen closer up. Or I might have chosen Jeremy Piven for Keeping Up With the Steins, because every time he came on screen I murmured “he’s pretty.” But I never would have chosen Will Smith. Not because his performance was bad, no, I’d have to actually see the film to be able to state such a thing, but because I just don’t like him. And since our current White House resident makes decisions all the time based on what he does and doesn’t like, I feel perfectly justified in doing the same.

So in this year’s Oscar competition we have an amazing performance, a man who was nominated for the wrong picture, a man who was nominated for eight pictures, a man who played Hercules on TV and a man who’s played a lot of arrogant characters who make fun of other people. Should be a fun race, no? Go Forest!