Jude Law: Cold Mountain
Ben Kingsley: The House of Sand and Fog
Bill Murray: Lost in Translation
Sean Penn: Mystic River (winner)
Johnny Depp: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
What’s Missing
This is a really good collection of movies and performances for this award for this year. Sure there are a couple that I might replace, but for Oscar, it’s not a bad collection. Still, there’s some room for improvement. We can start, as usual, with the performances that would never earn a nomination in a million years. For actors in 2003, that list has to start with Will Ferrell in Elf, which is probably the best and purest performance of his career. Oscar has never loved the horror-tinged, which leaves out Choi Min-sik in Oldboy. The other longshot here is Peter Dinklage in The Station Agent, a film that clearly flew under Oscar’s radar, much to its shame. The two performances of name actors in bigger releases that really could have been here are Paul Giamatti in American Splendor and Russell Crowe in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Weeding through the Nominees
5. I said above that it’s a good collection of nominees, and for the most part, it is, but I do wonder what Jude Law is doing here for his performance in Cold Mountain. The thing is that Renee Zellweger is absolutely the best part of the movie, and she deserved the Best Supporting Actress Oscar she won. Because of that, it’s hard to justify Law’s place on this list. Giamatti, Crowe, and Dinklage deserved to be here instead of him. Truthfully, I have trouble remembering him in the film.
4. So what are we to make of Johnny Depp’s nomination in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film? At the time, I think most of the people who pay attention to this sort of thing were rather charmed by the idea that Depp was nominated for what was essentially a 150-minute impersonation of Keith Richards. Now, almost a dozen and a half years after the fact, this is not a nomination that holds up very well. It really is just a 150-minute impersonation of Keith Richards, and we can do quite a bit more with nomination than this.
3. When he’s given good material to work with, few people are better in a role that Ben Kingsley. He’s at his best in The House of Sand and Fog, something that is equally true of everyone else on the screen in this movie. It’s an impressive performance, and one that stands out well in a packed movie. Putting Kingsley third is not a knock on him, but a recognition of just how good the other two performances were from this year. This is the sort of role that would win in a lot of years, but not this year.
2. I understand the win for Sean Penn in Mystic River. Like most of the actors nominated in this year, Penn is as good as anyone when he’s been given something to work with. That he got this nomination over Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon, both of whom are at the top of their games in this says a great deal about just how good Penn is and can be. I don’t really have a huge objection to him winning this Oscar even if he isn’t my pick. Penn has long been one of the best actors around, and Mystic River is some of his best work.
My Choice
1. My choice, though, is Bill Murray. Murray is always easy to like on the screen. He made a great deal of his career playing the guy who was a little bit smarter than everyone else, a little bit hipper, a little bit cooler. In Lost in Translation, he’s not that guy anymore. He’s befuddled and confused and sort ironically amused by it all. The reason I’m picking Murray here is not because it’s Bill Murray in a dramatic role or because it would be great for him to have an Oscar. I’m picking Bill Murray because I legitimately can’t think of a single person who could have played this role a tenth of as well as he did, and that’s what Oscars are made of.
Final Analysis
