First “Envelope” Picks
L.A. Times “Oscar Beat” columnist Steve Pond, New York Post critic Lou Lumenick and yours truly are the first three Oscar Wise Guys to name favorites in the top three races — Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress — on Tom O’Neill‘s L.A. Times-sponsored “The Envelope” website. Nine other pundits willl soon join in.
O’Neill writes that Lumenick’s decision to put United 93‘s Ben Sliney on his Best Actor list is a thin out-on-a-limb call — I agree only in the sense that Sliney belongs in the Best Supporting Actor category. Otherwise, I think he gives one of the most convincing performances of the year in Paul Greengrass‘s 9/11 film. And my putting Factory Girl’s Sienna Miller on my Best Actress list isn’t out-on-a-limb either because I’ve seen a rough cut of that film and I know she kills in it.
Sorry, but if a previously-nominated John Malkovich couldn’t garner a nomination for “playing himself” in a film netting other major Oscar nods and multiple other Best Picture citations, then Ben Sliney (who is quite good but not a professional actor) has zero chance for a film that will hardly garner a blip around Oscar time (I say 1 nod total: Editing).
Everyone is really underestimating The Good Shephard, and I’m not entirely sure why yet…
Sliney isn’t really ‘performing’ as much as he is ‘reenacting’ though. I loved the movie, but get real.
Sliney is great in the movie, but his acting doesn’t really cross the finish line for me as award worthy. He’s about 80% there but for that whatever it is that professional actors have which transcends purely personal charisma, which Sliney has like a pylon.
I’d be tickled to see him nominated as a supporting actor, but I wouldn’t want him to win (I’m a Steve Carell hoper, at the moment).
As for Sliney, Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives and Haing Ngor in The Killing Fields won Oscars as non-pros playing characters much like themselves.
Characters “much like themselves” and “themselves” are two different things, and just because Ngor witnessed the killing fields and Russell lost his hands doesn’t mean that the rest of their character arcs necessarily mirror their real lives as much as one would suspect (though obviously their experience informs their performances).
And more critically, Sliney disappears (and is sorely missed) in U93 once attention exclusively focuses on the plane.
Oscar nomination for Sienna Miller ??? NO WAY
I’m sorry but I still remember Sienna Miller, after last year’s Academy Awards, trying to have public sex with Sean Penn at the bar of the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Strip, in full view of hundreds of Hollywood producers, directors, and other moguls.
In “Factory Girl” Sienna Miller attempts to portray Edie Sedgwick, who was a real life muse of PITTSBURGH’S Andy Warhol.
After Sienna Miller’s RECENT crude comments and bizarre DIVA behavior in Pittsburgh during the filming of “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, do you really think that the hundreds of producers, directors, actors and writers in Hollywood that were either born in Pittsburgh or attended College in Pittsburgh would ever vote for the idiot Sienna Miller ???
Harvey & Bob Weinstein, save your money instead of wasting it on a Sienna Miller campaign.