Countdown to the Oscars: Best Actor

Welcome to this year’s edition of Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, where we will break down each of the 23 categories, analyze the films, and make some guesses at their awards prospects.

Best Actor

The nominees are:

Bradley Cooper in Maestro

Colman Domingo in Rustin

Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction

Bradley Cooper in Maestro

A quite silly narrative has built up around Cooper this season, which is that he is desperate for an Academy Award and that desperation is turning off voters. First of all, Cooper has: 1) directed back-to-back Best Picture nominees; 2) starred in eight films nominated for Best Picture; 3) been the lead of one of the most successful comedy franchises of all time (The Hangover trilogy); and 4) as Rocket Raccoon, been a key part of a wildly successful superhero trilogy and the larger universe around those movies. What I’m saying is that Cooper is not desperate for anything.

Furthermore, he wants an Oscar. So what? So does 90 percent of this town. The truly ridiculous part is that it’s not as if he has come out and said definitively how important it may or may not be to him to win one. Cynics simply prefer to read his genuine enthusiasm about the moviemaking process as desperation. But, even if he did just state outright that he wants a little gold statue, I would find that honesty refreshing. Bette Davis once said she’d like to have the record for most Oscars. I love it. More stars should be open with how they feel about winning an Oscar. Might help the show. Certainly couldn’t hurt it.

Cooper is great in a movie I found to be generally lacking, but there’s no lack of effort on his part. It’s all up there on the screen – the hours in the makeup chair, the months learning to conduct, the years to bring this story to theaters. Cooper works hard and he cares. If that’s embarrassing to a certain subset of folks, that sounds more like their problem than his. Cooper has been nominated for Best Actor twice before this for American Sniper and Silver Linings Playbook. He also has a Supporting Actor nod for American Hustle. Cooper’s going to win a statue someday, and that’s going to be a great day for him and for movies.

Colman Domingo in Rustin

From my piece on the best performances of 2023, where Domingo landed at No. 9: “Domingo has always been a chameleon in prominent supporting roles, whether as the menacing pimp in zola or as a beat-down jazz musician in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. At last, with Rustin, he gets a showcase for the full breadth of his talents. As civil rights hero Bayard Rustin, who begs, borrows, and steals to organize the 1963 March on Washington, Domingo never steps wrong. A Broadway star, Domingo knows how to deliver a big speech to the back row, but he is just as good in moments of quiet sadness as he struggles with his identity and a movement that wishes he would sit down and shut up.”

Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers

If I were to ask you how many Academy Award nominations Giamatti has, what number would you say? He’s been turning in fabulous work in popular, critically acclaimed films for nearly three decades now. It’s gotta be four or five or something like that, right? No. The Holdovers is just his second career nomination. The first came in 2006 for Best Supporting Actor for CInderella Man. Before and since then, until now, nothing, though his snub for Sideways remains one of the 21st century’s most baffling Oscars omissions.

The Holdovers is a perfect showcase for Giamatti, who specializes in sadsacks who learn a little something about themselves from the people in their lives. The teacher he plays in this movie opens his heart so gradually that by the time it happens, you can’t understand how you could have misjudged him. The heart, the soul, and the care that drive him, those things were there all along. He just needed a couple other lonely people to show him that they’re worth embracing and sharing. Just lovely work that could only have been done by Giamatti.

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Here’s some of what I wrote when I put Murphy at No. 3 on my list of the top performances of the year: “Every story beat, every thematic thread [director Christopher] Nolan is hoping to pull on, it’s all right there in Murphy’s sunken eyes and gaunt, angular visage. When you’ve got this, you don’t need anything else. The performance, however, is more than that thousand-yard stare you’ve seen a hundred times if you spend any time on the internet at all. It’s also in the frenetic energy Murphy brings to Oppenheimer’s moments of pure inspiration. It’s in the quiet confidence he displays as his world comes crashing down around him. It’s in every moment of the film. Oppenheimer is Nolan’s masterpiece because Oppenheimer is Murphy’s masterpiece.”

Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction

Wright’s Monk and Giamatti’s character in The Holdovers have a lot in common. They’re both teachers who have let their bitterness about the world get in the way of making genuine human connection. They’re both frustrated writers. And, they both just need to let a little love into their lives. The difference is a matter of tone. Where The Holdovers is a quiet dramedy, American Fiction is largely a broad satire. Each man calibrates his performance to the style of the film he’s in beautifully, and it’s no mistake that they have both landed nominations.

For Wright, this first Oscar nod feels like a long time coming. From the first time he practically jumped off the screen as the titular lead of Basquiat in 1996, it was clear Wright was a special talent. Hollywood has mostly limited him to supporting roles in franchises like The Hunger Games, the most recent James Bond flick, and the Robert Pattinson Batman movie. With American Fiction, the spotlight is fully on Wright, and he doesn’t waste a minute of it. We can hope this kicks off a string of great leading roles for the venerable performer.

The final analysis

After Giamatti won the Critics Choice Award and he and Murphy split the Golden Globes, it appeared as though we could be headed for a toss-up here. Then, Murphy won the BAFTA and the SAG award, Oppenheimer won for ensemble, and all the momentum just shifted to Murphy. I don’t know what Giamatti’s future at the Oscars holds. He sure seems like an actor people would like to give one of these statues to, but it’s not going to be this year. This time around, it’s Murphy’s to lose.

Will win: Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Should win: Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Should have been here: Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers

A note about my favorite snub: I named Scott’s work in All of Us Strangers the best performance of the year, and it has only grown in my estimation since I wrote about it two months ago. It’s a performance that has the power to shatter you in one moment, then piece you back together in the next. Scott plays the pain and loneliness and longing about as well as anyone ever has, but Andrew Haigh’s film is ultimately about hope and letting love guide our lives. Scott hits these notes perfectly, as well, and there is never a time when we are not right there with the character, rooting for him through every beautiful, heartbreaking moment.

New movie review: Love & Mercy

Paul Dano plays the young Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad's remarkable Love & Mercy.

Brian Wilson is a genius. Full stop. As the primary creative force behind The Beach Boys, he is responsible for crafting some of the catchiest pop melodies this side of The Beatles, and his complex musical and vocal arrangements have been and will be studied by musicians and critics for decades. His contributions to popular music are innumerable, and his influence is as widespread as it is singular. There is no one like him.

It is also indisputable that he has lived a hard life. Every step of the way, he was harassed, abused, and exploited by those around him. His petty, vindictive father terrorized him his whole life. He succumbed to drugs, alcohol abuse, and mental illness. He famously spent three years lying in bed, haunted by the voices in his head and the demons in his thoughts. His greatest gift is also his curse, and though the creative spirit he embodies has been battered and bruised by the world around him, it has not been broken.

The story of Wilson’s life is by turns haunting, surreal, sad, and triumphant and deserves a film of equal depth and complexity. That film is director-producer Bill Pohlad’s tender, beautiful Love & Mercy. Pohlad has spent most of his career as a producer, helping shepherd to the screen films such as 12 Years a Slave, The Tree of Life, and Brokeback Mountain. Here, he takes over the director’s chair for the first time in 25 years, and the results are stunning.

Working from a screenplay by Oren Moverman and Michael A. Lerner, Pohlad portrays Wilson’s life as a gorgeous, elliptical tone poem about the confused and hyperactive mind of a brilliant artist. Pohlad avoids the pitfalls of most by-the-numbers music biopics by not focusing on dry biography – though the film is impeccably researched and detailed – and instead presenting events as Wilson would have experienced and interpreted them.

John Cuscak and Elizabeth Banks in Love & Mercy.

The film is split into two parts given roughly equal weight. Paul Dano plays a younger Wilson shown struggling to take the band and its music in new directions with the recording of the now-legendary Pet Sounds. John Cusack plays Wilson two decades later, after his “bed” period and while under the control of psychiatrist Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). During this time, he meets Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who tries to help him break free of Landy’s influence.

All of the performances are superb, and Banks in particular is a revelation. Known almost exclusively for her comedic roles, though some audiences will no doubt recognize her best as Effie Trinket from the Hunger Games films, Banks plumbs depths of emotional resolve and compassion that she has rarely been able to showcase. She more than rises to the challenge, exerting herself as the conscience of the film as Ledbetter is the only person we meet who sees Wilson for the man he is behind the myth.

Giamatti turns in typically excellent work as Landy, whose purposeful misdiagnosis allows him to take guardianship of Wilson and bend and manipulate him to his will with a cocktail of medications and psychological abuse. In an older but not-yet-wise Wilson, Cusack gets a role befitting his immense talent. Through all his lies and fabrications, Landy says one true thing – that Wilson is a boy in a man’s body – and Cusack’s subtle, introverted work perfectly captures that truth.

This half of the movie comprises a more traditional narrative, which is strong, if a bit clichéd and propped up by its wonderful actors. The sequences with younger Wilson, identified in the credits as “Past Brian,” are another matter altogether. In showing the process of creation, Pohlad mixes film stocks, plays tricks with the soundscape, and shuffles our perception of time to put the audience directly in the mind of a musician having an artistic and spiritual breakthrough.

Though the supporting performances are strong, Dano is like a one-man show through this section of the film. An actor who has showed immense promise in films as diverse as Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood, here, he realizes the full potential of his talents. Wilson cannot escape his past as every element of his life conspires to drag him back to a place of pain and misery. Dano embodies this man who wants so badly to please others and express himself artistically but keeps finding these two endeavors to be contradictory. Making full use of his face, voice, and mannerisms, Dano brings to life someone who is simultaneously breaking through and breaking down.

In service of all these wonderful performances, Pohlad provides an immaculately crafted world for his actors to explore and for his to take root. It is hard to think of a recent film that has used sound so well and in so many different ways. From the complete lack of artifice in Wilson’s hammering out of a rough version of “God Only Knows” to the sonic collage of past Beach Boys hits – provided by frequent Trent Reznor collaborator and Oscar winner Atticus Ross – Pohlad creates a universe of sound that is rarely pleasant but always emotionally resonant. This, we can infer, is what it sounds like to be Wilson.

The portrait of Wilson in Love & Mercy is that of neither saint nor sinner. He has done wrong and been wronged. For every triumph, he has been exposed to a trial. While the people in his life have hurt him, he has endured and persevered with help of others. His successes have not inured him to the difficulties of life. He is a genius whose struggles have humbled him. He does not ask for pity or praise. All he needs is a little – well, it’s right there in the title.

See it? Yes.