In Contention

Tag: Life is Beautiful

  • Just because I don’t get it, doesn’t mean it’s not good

    Citizen KaneKris is taking some heat in some quarters for his comments on “WALL-E,” and while he has never said it was a bad film, he didn’t fall over himself seeking superlatives for it either.  In fact, the movie did not do much for Kris, which is an unpopular sentiment, given the critics awards and rave reviews for the film.

    Why is this not okay with some people?  Similarly, why is not okay to say that one does not feel “Citizen Kane” is the greatest film of all time? I don’t think it is and you have no idea the heat I take for that. Kris made a bold decision, one he believed in, one he felt was right, one that was honest.

    When will people realize that at the end of the day we are all critics with an opinion, but some of us are fortunate enough to do it for a living?  Does that set us apart?  Not really.

    Watching a film is connected to the oldest of rituals, similar to the ancient Greeks filing in to see a play and watching with rapt attention the players on stage. They then left the play and discussed it, just as we do today with cinema. Maybe we like the film, maybe we don’t…it is all opinion-based and at the end of the day, no one is really wrong.

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  • What’s the worst Best Actor choice of all time?

    Roberto Benigni at the Academy Awards in 1999With the Bat frenzy settling down, and the Toronto Fest looming just ahead, I thought I’d get back to, well, complaining about the Academy’s more lame-brained calls over the years!

    What has been the group’s single worst choice for Best Actor in its 80 year history?  My choice: Roberto Benigni for “Life is Beautiful” in 1998.

    I remember sitting stunned when his name was called out at the Screen Actors Guild awards for his incessant, mugging in the film, possibly the most over-praised endeavor of 1998. What this meant of course was that he now had the inside track to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for this ridiculous performance.

    And he did just that, clowning around, jumping up on the seats of those around him, massacring the English language (which he speaks perfectly fine) with his acceptance speech, trying his best to be endearing and beloved.

    How and why did this performance — and this film — become so beloved by the AMPAS?

    Among the performances Benigni defeated that year were Edward Norton’s seething work in “American History X,” Tom Hanks’s superb turn in “Saving Private Ryan” and Nick Nolte’s raging performance in “Affliction.” Each performance was vastly superior to Begnini’s, and as always, some of those not nominated could have easily taken his place.  Jim Carrey in “The Truman Show” comes to mind.

    Hollywood, however, fell in love with Mr. Begnini as he cruised through cocktail party after cocktail party, dinner at Barbara Streisand’s house, the entire town entranced by a brown-eyed clown.

    His performance was little more than over the top shameless mugging for the camera — “acting” at its worst. For that he gets an Oscar, along with nominations for Best Director and a win for Best Foreign Language Film??

    There have been terrible Oscar wins in the past, of course: “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Elizabeth Taylor for “Butterfield 8,” Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman.  But has the Academy ever been so incredibly bamboozled by a film and a performer as they were in 1998?

    What about you?  What do you think is the Academy’s all time worst choice for Best Actor?  Or Best Foreign Language Film for that matter?

  • Best actor contenders join an eclectic list of recent winners

    Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Frank Langella seem to be the names bandied about for Oscar consideration this year, which would place them in some impressive company of nominees and winners these last 20 years. Of course, that said, there have also been some bizarre choices for the Best Actor award, which has often left me shaking my head in disgust and wondering what these voters were actually seeing.

    Since 1988, there have been 10 winners that perhaps should not have been, the award arguably deserved by another of the nominees, or worse, an actor not nominated! Consider Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man,” a widely acclaimed performance that asked that he not connect with anyone in the film, never make eye contact, rock back and forth and speak in a nasally voice.

    Stop what you are doing right now and try what he did in the film, and trust me it is very easy to do. Now do you deserve an Oscar for doing what Hoffman did in that film? The real perfortmance in “Rain Man” was that of Tom Cruise, who we watched evolve over the course of the film, and of course the best performance of that year was Gene Hackman as the tough investigator in “Mississippi Burning.” Hackman was nominated, but he stood no chance in the wake of the juggernaut of support for Hoffman, who in fact should have won years before for his miraculous work in “Tootsie!”

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