Countdown to the Oscars: Best Actor

Leonardo DiCaprio is the frontrunner for Best Actor for his performance in The Revenant.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Actor

The nominees are:

Bryan Cranston for Trumbo

Matt Damon for The Martian

Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant

Michael Fassbender for Steve Jobs

Eddie Redmayne for The Danish Girl

You cannot stop a moving train, especially when this particular train has been picking up steam for more than two years now. The world wants to see DiCaprio win an Oscar. The Internet certainly does, and for the first time, it seems like the Academy is coming around to that view as well. For the most part, this started two years ago when DiCaprio’s The Wolf of Wall Street performance lost out to Matthew McConaughey’s more traditional work in Dallas Buyers Club.

There are other exceptional performances this year – Fassbender and Cranston are particularly memorable – but there is no other narrative as strong as the one building up around DiCaprio. Damon and Redmayne have already won Oscars. Cranston is beloved, but he is a first-time nominee. Fassbender, like DiCaprio a generation-defining talent, will have other chances. No, the story is DiCaprio and his long-overdue recognition as one of the best in the business.

Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant – In reality, the obsession with DiCaprio winning an Oscar started long before The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio has been one of the biggest stars in the world for nearly 20 years, but even before Titanic rocketed him to superstardom, he was an Oscar nominee for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Many felt he was snubbed for Titanic, and in some quarters, a narrative built up that Academy members might consider DiCaprio too much of a pretty boy whose success was derived from looks and youth more than talent.

However, DiCaprio made smart choice after smart choice, rarely faltering in the projects he championed and never turning in a bad performance. His nominated work on The Aviator and Blood Diamond, as well as The Departed and Shutter Island, showed an actor willing to dig into the psyches of his characters and deliver raw, visceral experiences onscreen. We associate “getting ugly” with Best Actress winners – such as Charlize Theron in Monster or Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball – but the phenomenon is just as real for Best Actor. Consider McConaughey, Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland, and Adrian Brody in The Pianist.

Well, DiCaprio not only “gets ugly” in The Revenant, but he goes feral, eating raw bison liver and subjecting himself to the many hardships of the frontier all in order to bring the story of Hugh Glass to life. However, this is more than a physical stunt. It is a searing, emotional portrait of a man betrayed, adrift, and alone. DiCaprio has never been better, and no other leading actor this year was this good. He will win, and in at least one respect, all will seem right.

Michael Fassbender for Steve Jobs – Interestingly, the last time Fassbender was nominated, he lost Best Supporting Actor for his performance in 12 Years a Slave to McConaughey’s Dallas Buyers Club co-star Jared Leto. I would have gone the other way, but at least the Academy’s choice was defensible. What is not defensible is the fact that Fassbender is on just his second nomination after incomparable work in films such as Hunger, Shame, and Frank. Oh well, he is in the club now, and he will keep coming back because there is no other actor like him working today.

Director Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs is a frustrating movie with a number of fine elements teetering on the edge but never tipping over into greatness because the whole exercise feels just a little too self-conscious. Fassbender, however, is scintillating as the title character, a business genius whose personal life is in shambles. He creates chaos everywhere he goes, but because he sits in the eye of the storm, everything seems perfectly clear to him. Fassbender brings out the frustration and rage of someone who believes he is better than everyone else and cannot tolerate playing down to their level.

Bryan Cranston for Trumbo – Speaking of frustration and rage, we also have Cranston’s blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. A brilliant wordsmith, Trumbo was persecuted for his political beliefs, and rather than back down, he fought back with his typewriter. He refused to let the system shut him up and stood up to become a hero for freedom of expression. The great thing about Cranston’s performance is that he does not play Trumbo as a hero. Instead, he shows us a man annoyed by the stupidity and bigotry he must endure. He battles because it is in his nature to fight. He just happens to be fighting for a righteous cause.

Cranston is a beloved and respected figure in the industry. Though he is mostly known for his television work on Breaking Bad, for which he won four Emmys and a Golden Globe, Cranston has proven to be a popular character actor in films such as Drive, Argo, and Little Miss Sunshine. He is even the best part of the otherwise disposable Godzilla remake from 2014. In his first true leading film role, he knocks it out of the park. He will continue to be a force in this industry for as long as he wants, but this will not be the year he wins an Oscar.

Matt Damon for The Martian – Damon was the nominee about whom no one was really certain. There were a few other options hanging around the edges of the season such as Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Will Smith in Concussion, but ultimately, Damon prevailed. Looking back, it should not be that shocking – and if I can toot my own horn, this is the exact lineup I predicted in this category back at the beginning of December.

Damon carries The Martian on his shoulders entirely. The scenes back on Earth with the NASA team and everyone else are important to the plot of course, but the movie does not work without a tremendous actor playing Mark Watney, the man stranded on Mars. Damon is the perfect combination of brainy, funny, and sympathetic to pull off this role. Even in dire circumstances, he remains fun to watch because he gives the character a spark of mischievousness to counteract the seriousness of the situation. Everything we feel when watching The Martian is because Damon is able to bring those feelings out in us.

Eddie Redmayne for The Danish Girl – If Redmayne had not won this award just last year for The Theory of Everything, this awards race might have been a little closer. Indeed, some were positing that Redmayne could become the first back-to-back Best Actor winner since Tom Hanks in 1993-94 and just the third ever. Alas, The Danish Girl did not catch fire, either at the box office or with the industry, meaning Redmayne’s work does not have the necessary heat to make history at the Oscars.

The work is solid, and it is mesmerizing to watch Redmayne make the transition from portraying a confused man to a man becoming a woman and finally to the woman that man always was. Redmayne finds a number of subtle notes to play in the transformation, and with his guidance, the audience is never at a loss to understand the character. By the end, Redmayne simply becomes Lili, and it is as if that is how it was always meant to be.

The final analysis

There is not much else to say. Cranston and Fassbender each picked up some early critics’ awards, but that was before the locomotive that is DiCaprio in The Revenant pulled out of the station. Since then, DiCaprio has taken everything in sight – the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, and the BAFTA, among others. When he wins an Academy Award next Sunday, it will be one of my favorite moments in Oscar history, watching my favorite actor accept an award he richly deserves.

Will win: Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant

Should win: Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant

Should have been here: Tom Courtenay for 45 Years

Tomorrow: Best Documentary

New movie review: The Danish Girl

Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander star in director Tom Hooper's rich historical drama The Danish Girl.

I sincerely hope that 50 years from now, people look back on how we live today and wonder how we did it. If two or three generations from now kids cannot fathom the way the world worked in 2015, society will have achieved some kind of success. Nothing against today, of course, but we all hopefully want the same thing – for our children’s lives to be better than ours. So far, in the course of human history, we have done pretty well.

In the U.S., for instance, every generation can say it did better than people 50 years previously. We have problems. We always have, and we always will. Perfection is impossible, but progress should never be. Advances in technology, communication, medicine, and human rights have made this the best time to be alive in our collective history, but if future generations do not blow us out of the water with their amelioration, something will have gone horribly wrong.

I thought about all of this a lot while watching director Tom Hooper’s stylish historical drama The Danish Girl. Just as sure as Lili Elbe was born in the wrong body, she was born in the wrong time. It has never been easy to be a transgender person. Still today, despite increased visibility and tolerance thanks to celebrities such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox, the battle for basic rights and respect rages on. Now, imagine the first couple decades of the 20th century, when even a basic malady might get you subjected to shock treatments, radiation therapy, or whatever other quackery was en vogue.

Lili’s short, sad journey through life was marked by all of these and more, but it was marked also by compassion, strength, and love, which Hooper and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon go to great lengths to tease out in The Danish Girl. Through its lush cinematography and elegant production design, the film argues – rightly, in my opinion – that the experience of discovering your truest self is as much sensory as it is emotional. The camera lingers on fabrics and textures that illuminate Lili’s inner world, even as she is trapped in the body and life of popular Danish painter Einar Wegener.

Coxon’s script is based on the David Ebershoff novel of the same name, which is a highly fictionalized account of Lili’s life story. Where the historical Lili’s life was more complex and decidedly tragic, Coxon, and Ebershoff before her, draw out the romance at the heart of Lili’s life in her marriage to fellow painter Gerda Wegener. By focusing so acutely on the love story, the filmmakers give the plot an easy-to-follow through line and give modern audiences something more tangible to grasp.

Eddie Redmayne, fresh off an Academy Award win for last year’s The Theory of Everything, plays Lili, and he brings the same commitment and passion to this performance as he brought to that previous biopic. It is a cliché to say that an actor “disappears” into a part, but for Redmayne’s dual role as Einar and Lili, the description is apt. He is tasked with portraying two characters – one long hidden; the other fading away – in a constant struggle for supremacy.

It perhaps goes without saying – yet here I find myself saying it – Redmayne’s work as Lili is the kind of transformative, heady work that, yes, wins Oscars but also takes audiences deep inside the life and mind of the character. However, I found myself even more impressed by his performance as Einar, who is wholly a construct, a façade that can no longer hold back the truth. It is painful to watch as Einar fights to keep up the charade he has propagated while Lili refuses to be denied her right to existence any longer. It is a role with a high degree of difficulty, carried off wonderfully by Redmayne.

Vikander in The Danish Girl.

This makes it all the more remarkable that Alicia Vikander not only holds her own but often outshines Redmayne as Gerda, whose life is thrown into chaos by Lili’s sudden awakening. Vikander was amazing as the possibly sentient robot Ava earlier this year in Ex Machina, and here she brings out a different side of herself, though no less strong or impressive.

The script treats the story of Gerda, who is a talented artist in her own right, as equally important to that of Lili. This allows Vikander to dig deeply into the role of a woman who fears she is losing her husband but also must come to grips with the fact she may never have had one in the first place. She is supportive and understanding, but she refuses to put her life on the back burner, and Vikander infuses her character with a depth of sensitivity and soul few actresses could match.

Though it is not factually accurate, the story Coxon chooses to tell of Lili and Gerda feels emotionally honest. It is a love story, though ultimately a platonic one. Once Einar is irretrievably lost, leaving only Lili in his place, Gerda must decide what it was she loved about Einar and whether she can give that same love to Lili. It is a tale of acceptance and tolerance that would not be out of place today, nearly 85 years since the real Lili died. So, maybe I am wrong, and we have not come as far as I would like to think, but in 50 years, who knows?

See it? Yes.

That’s a wrap: Best and worst of Hollywood’s biggest night

Team Birdman, led by director Alejandro González Iñárritu, accepts the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Well, that’s it. Months of movie-going, campaigning, and precursor awards, and now, it is all over. Birdman, a film that most predicted would win last night, did win, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Whiplash enjoyed good nights, as well, and Boyhood went home almost empty-handed. The show ended a few minutes after midnight here on the East Coast, something the producers always strive to avoid, but if you read on, I have a few suggestions on how to cut some time from the show – as I am sure you all might.

Click here to go to a full list of winners, and read on for Last Cinema Standing’s best and worst things about the 87th Academy Awards.

Best

The winners – People like to grouse about the nominees list every year for what missed out or sometimes for what got in, and those complaints are often valid. However, on the whole, when it comes to picking winners, the Academy does a marvelous job. Birdman is an unimpeachable Best Picture winner, Alejandro González Iñárritu is among the most deserving Best Director winners, and the film’s screenplay win delighted me to no end.

As much as I may have been pulling for other films and performances, it would be hard to argue with a winners list that includes Eddie Redmayne’s magnificent work as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, the great shorts Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, The Phone Call, and Feast, and three well deserved citations for Whiplash.

Neil Patrick Harris – I try not to read any reviews of the show for a while after it ends because I like to decide what I think first. For whatever reason, I am rarely in the consensus, in that I tend to like the show. I do not know if that makes me really unhip or just less of a grouch than most people when it comes to the Oscars. Probably a little of both. I thought Harris was fun, funny, and swift, and he killed it with Anna Kendrick and Jack Black during the opening musical number written by last year’s Best Song winners Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. I have a hard time believing Common and John Legend will be back to write next year’s opening number, though I would definitely tune in for that.

I liked the magic trick-style payoff to the predictions in the box, and it was fun watching a mostly befuddled Octavia Spencer play along. The seat-fillers bit was good, and really, once you know where to look, you cannot un-see those people. It was particularly jarring when after watching Redmayne and his wife together all night, Redmayne was on stage accepting his award for Best Actor, and someone else was sitting next to her. I thought Harris got in some good jokes, kept the show moving, and was a generally fun presence I would love to see come back.

The speeches – From Patricia Arquette winning Supporting Actress to John Legend and Common with Best Song and all the way up to Iñárritu when Birdman won Best Picture, the calls for equality rang loud and clear from the Dolby Theater last night. Arquette called for equal pay for women in the U.S. – something Meryl Streep clearly was on board with – while Common reminded us that what Martin Luther King Jr. fought for is still being fought for, and Iñárritu called for better treatment of immigrants in this nation. They were brave and important messages spoken by Hollywood’s brightest stars on its biggest stage. Good on them for using their platform to try to make a difference.

Beyond that, I loved watching Best Foreign Language Film winner Pawel Pawlikowsi talk straight through the crescendo of the play-off music and then just keep going. A couple winners did that last night, and why not? No one knows if they will ever be back, so let them soak up every last minute of it. Thankfully, no one’s microphone was cut off. If the night truly is about the winners, they should be allowed to speak, and the director and producers did a good job of letting that happen.

John Legend and Common perform “Glory” – Speaking of John Legend and Common, how about that performance of their original song “Glory” from Selma? It was a weighty moment, filled with meaning for millions across the world and many in the audience. It brought the audience in the Dolby Theater to its feet and had stars such as David Oyelowo and Chris Pine in tears. The performance will live on in Oscar history. To cap it with an Oscar win, well, how could you not vote for that song?

Worst

The Sound of Music tribute – What was that? A 50-year-old movie that most of the world has seen does not need a montage of non-descript clips and a lackluster musical performance. It would be one thing if the tribute performance had been memorable in any way, but Lady Gaga’s sedate medley of numbers from a fairly dusty musical just added to the inanity of it all.

They did this last year with the 75-year anniversary tribute to The Wizard of Oz, and it did not work then, either. A few years back, there was a tribute to movie musicals in general, which made no sense. Enough. We get it. Musical performances seem like they would make for a good show. They do not. This is neither the Grammys nor the Tony Awards. This is the Oscars. The opening musical number and the Best Song performances (see above) are plenty.

Post-In Memoriam performance – On that note, this is the second year in a row they have had the In Memoriam segment followed by a musical performance tribute. Last year was Bette Midler. This year was Jennifer Hudson. Neither year worked. As soon as the show ends, people complain about its length – and often, they do not wait that long. Doubling the running time of the In Memoriam segment does nothing to help that cause, particularly when an extra song actually distracts from the memory of those lost. Either sing under the montage or get rid of the song.

My predictions – Mea culpa. Every year, I go about predicting these things in completely the wrong way. I am always trying to beat everyone else by going with outside-the-box predictions for things that might happen. Well, that is not the way to do it. The consensus usually knows what is going to happen, and I either willfully ignore it or think I know better. No more. Next year, I’m going 24 for 24, guaranteed.

That’s a wrap

Thanks to those of you who have checked in these past few weeks and months to talk about films and indulge my hobby. I love this stuff. There is not a night I enjoy more than the Oscars, and I am glad you folks hung around these parts to share that with me. I am going to take a little time off here to recover, but I will be back soon with more reviews, more columns, and more talk about films I love that I hope you will love, too.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Actor

Eddie Redmayne is the frontrunner for Best Actor for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Actor

The nominees are:

Bradley Cooper for American Sniper

Michael Keaton for Birdman

Steve Carell for Foxcatcher

Benedict Cumberbatch for The Imitation Game

Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything

Best Actor is easily the most stacked category every year, with a ton of worthy contenders and too few spots to put them in. This year, for instance, you could put together a list of great performances that would make a tremendous list of nominees without including a single one of the actual nominees. As a thought experiment, here is my alternative list: Jake Gyllenhaal for Nightcrawler; Timothy Spall for Mr. Turner; Brendan Gleeson for Calvary; David Oyelowo for Selma; and Phillip Seymour Hoffman for A Most Wanted Man.

I could go on like this all day with Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year, John Lithgow in Love Is Strange, Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice, Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood, Aleksey Serebryakov in Leviathan, and on and on and on. The point is that while the five nominated performances are each fantastic in their own right, the Best Actor category at the Oscars is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the best performances of the year. It is not just this year either, as similarly long lists could be made for any year. If you want to talk about Best Actress, it could fall the same way, though the contender field there is often unfairly narrow, and that is a good discussion to have another day.

What we have, then, are the five performances Academy members liked best, and all credit to them, they liked some damn good performances. Maybe most remarkable is that four of the five nominees, including the two frontrunners, are first-time nominees. None of these actors has won an Academy Award before. In fact, this is the only acting category this year not to feature a previous winner. The last time not one of the nominees was a previous winner was in 2006, so no matter who wins, it will be a history-making night for someone.

Michael Keaton for Birdman – No one in the Best Actor category this year had the same task as Keaton. While the other four nominees were all playing real people – meaning they had books, interviews, videos, etc., to base their performances on – Keaton created a whole new person from just the words on the page. Great words though they may be, they mean nothing without Keaton’s incomparable contribution. He is the heart and soul of Birdman, the burning fire at the center of the film. His performance lends poignancy, gravitas, and humanity to an otherwise caustically satirical endeavor.

Keaton is Riggan Thompson, not because of who he is in life but because of who he is as an actor. Keaton is not great as Thompson because he once played Batman and Thompson once played a Batman-like superhero called Birdman. A lot of actors have played superheroes at one time or another, and more now than ever before, but no other actor could have brought the deep wells of pain and anguish that Keaton brings to the part. This is not a case of stunt casting. It is an instance of casting the perfect actor in the role of a lifetime.

Keaton embraces all of the flaws and contradictions of a man who just wants to be seen as an artist but who has a history of selling out that goal. Every time he walks on stage, he takes with him the hurt of a failed marriage, a washed up career, and a lack of respect. Birdman does not tell the story of a man overcoming all these grievances but of a man who finally channels these grievances into the art he so desperately wishes to make. The words of the writers create this world, but it is Keaton who makes them fly off the page.

Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything – In a relatively brief career, Redmayne has been involved in a number of highly prestigious projects, including Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables, My Week with Marilyn, and The Good Shepherd, but perhaps none has carried more inherent prestige than this biopic of Stephen Hawking. For The Theory of Everything, Redmayne takes on the unenviable task of portraying a famous and beloved figure who is still very much alive and very much in the public consciousness.

Redmayne handles the project by going above and beyond the call of duty and does not so much play Hawking as become him. He has the look, the walk, and the attitude of a man whose body keeps him trapped but whose mind takes him places the rest of us could not even dream about. Characters with disabilities have always been seen somewhat derisively as Oscar bait, but Redmayne does not attempt to milk Hawking’s motor neuron disease for pathos. Instead, he treats it as a fact of life to be dealt with and overcome so that he may attend to more important matters.

In the film’s best scene – and one of the best scenes of the year – Hawking becomes frustrated that he cannot keep up with the pace of a dinner with friends and excuses himself from the table. He attempts to climb the stairs but collapses. He cannot go up or down. Then, he sees his son standing at the top of the stairs behind a safety gate, but the son does not seem as locked in as Hawking in this moment. He tries to reach out to his child, but he cannot connect with him. Redmayne is able to show us this haunting and tragic moment with his body, but he makes us understand it with the longing and despair on his face.

Bradley Cooper for American Sniper – Cooper is the only previous Oscar nominee in this group, and he has been nominated in three consecutive years – for Best Actor in 2012 for Silver Linings Playbook, for Best Supporting Actor last year for American Hustle, and this year. It has been a kind of remarkable career transformation for Cooper, whom many of us first took notice of in The Hangover, though if you are a David Wain fan, you were enjoying Cooper’s comedy chops as far back as Wet Hot American Summer in 2001.

American Sniper was a passion project of Cooper’s, something he has wanted to bring to the screen for years. He chased it through numerous directors and production delays until he and director Clint Eastwood were finally able to bring the story of Chris Kyle to the screen. Cooper’s passion behind the scenes is clearly matched by his dedication on screen, as he transforms himself into a U.S. Navy SEAL.

Cooper has charisma to burn, but here, he channels that energy into a man who has a deep love for his country and an abiding need to defend it but for whom the horror of war gradually begins to take its toll. Cooper looks appropriately warrior-like in his action scenes, but when you watch him at home, that is where the real work appears. Cooper absolutely embodies a man who leaves a piece of his soul on the battlefield every time he goes out and who must fight to keep what he has left when there is no more war to fight.

Benedict Cumberbatch for The Imitation Game – Cumberbatch’s Best Actor case is an interesting one. On one level, he is fantastic in the film as mathematics genius and British war hero Alan Turing, but on another, taken out of the context of The Imitation Game, the performance feels like another in a string of recent performances by actors using the same set of tricks to portray a character who is clearly on the autism spectrum. Cumberbatch, himself, does a riff on the autistic genius who does not get along so well with people on his television show Sherlock. It is a trope that has become commonplace in modern storytelling, so how to judge Cumberbatch’s work here?

Objectively, it is an undeniably solid performance. Given a character who has difficulty showing emotion and who lives so much inside his own head, Cumberbatch communicates a world of feeling and soul simply with his body language and facial expressions. Really, Cumberbatch is marvelous as Turing. The problem is that Turing is not a well written character in the film. Because the character shows little depth, writer Graham Motion does not imbue him with any. Whatever depth we sense in Turing is thanks to Cumberbatch’s excellent portrayal.

Steve Carell for Foxcatcher – Let’s try not to make this about a comedic actor impressing everyone by going dramatic. In the first place, it has been done before with great success, and more than that, Carell already has a demonstrated facility with dramatic acting, even in ostensible comedies such as Little Miss Sunshine and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. So, it would be great if we could all stop acting so surprised Carell was able to pull off such a magnificent portrayal of a mentally disturbed millionaire in Foxcatcher. He is a great actor, and that is what actors do.

John du Pont, as played by Carell, is a man devoid of either heart or soul. His ghostly pallor suggests a body drained of blood. What he subsists on is power, and he wields it like the only weapon he has. He is an impossibly careful man who speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence and does not so much walk as shuffle. Appearances are everything for him, and the worst fate that could befall him is to be perceived as weak or incompetent. Carell embraces the character as only a gifted actor could and pulls the nearly impossible trick of making a wealthy psychopath understandable, if not sympathetic.

The final analysis

It will be Keaton and Redmayne down to the wire, and Redmayne has a slight advantage, having won the Screen Actors Guild award and the British Academy of Film and Television award. Each won a Golden Globe – Keaton in comedy and Redmayne in drama. Early in the season, some thought Redmayne and Cumberbatch might split the British genius vote, paving the way for a Keaton win, but Cumberbatch’s campaign never materialized. Now, some are theorizing that Keaton and Redmayne may split the vote and clear a path for Cooper to win.

I never have really subscribed to the idea that a split vote could lead to a surprise winner. For that to be true, the third candidate would have to have as much support as the two leaders without losing any votes to them. The math just does not seem to work. I would love to see Keaton onstage accepting an Oscar. It would be one of the highlights of my night. However, all signs point to Redmayne winning for his transformative portrayal of Hawking, and it is hard to argue with that.

Will win: Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything

Should win: Michael Keaton for Birdman

Wish he had been here: Jake Gyllenhaal for Nightcrawler