And Salon's honorary Oscar goes to...
Alec Baldwin, who blew us away in not one, not two, but three movies this year alone. Someone hand that man a gold statuette!
By Stephanie Zacharek
Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Alec Baldwin, Arts & Entertainment, Academy Awards
Photo: Universal, Warner Bros. and TriStar
Alec Baldwin in "The Good Shepherd," "The Departed" and "Running With Scissors."
Feb. 24, 2007 | Whenever Oscar time rolls around, there are always certain performances that seem so completely award-worthy (Peter O'Toole's in "Venus"; Jennifer Hudson's in "Dreamgirls"; Helen Mirren's in "The Queen") that it almost doesn't matter who ultimately collects the statue. In some ways, the race is over before it's begun: By the time all of the critics groups have announced their awards, by the time the Golden Globes have rolled over the horizon for another year, most moviegoers have pretty much decided which of the year's performances they enjoyed most, and, of the performances they missed, which ones they'd like to check out. The Academy Awards show itself, as compelled as most of us are to watch it, feels like an afterthought, little more than a roundup of the usual suspects, albeit in fancy clothes.
But every year there's at least one performer who did astonishing work and yet failed to show up on anyone's radar, slipping by unnoticed even by most critics. For me this year, that someone is Alec Baldwin, who appeared in three pictures, "The Good Shepherd," "The Departed" and "Running With Scissors." He's terrific in the first two, and off the charts in the third, playing a martini-swizzling dad who just can't comprehend why his young son is so different from him. Baldwin's role is small, and he appears mostly in the movie's first section, which is set in the late 1960s. But the performance works as a miniature study of bewildered fatherhood, and of the way some men, locked in an older generation's vision of what it meant to be a father, and a man, were left behind by what passed for free thinking in the 1960s (and some of it wasn't so free). The movie loses something when Baldwin's character drifts away, and for me, nothing else in it -- not even Annette Bening's carefully controlled turn as an unbalanced mom -- had much of an effect, because Baldwin had already broken my heart.
We're conditioned to believe that big, starring roles are somehow more significant than smaller ones. It's always been that way: The phrase "character actor," a humble title if ever there was one, suggests a performer who's been tucked into the margins of a movie for color and zip, but who wouldn't be big enough to carry a picture in a starring role.
But the best character actors aren't lesser lights at all: In many cases, what they do is so potent that even a small dose packs a wallop. And that's how I've come to think of Baldwin, who's become one of the most dependable character actors in the movies, one who can give shape and meaning to even a very small role or who, even in a light, breezy turn, can give so much pleasure that he instantly elevates the quality of the picture around him.
As the long, winding ribbon of TV and movie credits that make up his IMDb listing suggests, Baldwin is the consummate working actor. In movies, he's played thugs and baddies of all stripes (maybe partly because he always looks good in a suit with strong shoulders), and a lot of armed forces higher-ups (maybe partly because he also looks pretty good in a uniform). He's done a short soap-opera stint, as well as voice-over narration work on TV's "Thomas the Tank Engine." Occasionally in his career, he's been cast as a leading man (in pictures like "The Marrying Man," with his then-future, now-ex wife Kim Basinger) and as a heroic lead (in "Ghosts of Mississippi" and "The Hunt for Red October"), but those performances aren't the ones that have stuck. Instead, Baldwin has become a stealth actor, almost a secret ingredient, a face we're always pleased to see. In a crappy movie, he's often the actor who rescues us, at least temporarily. In a good movie, he always manages to stand out without upstaging anyone, or anything, around him. No wonder he works so often: It's not every actor who, even in just a small way, can always make a movie better.