Salon.com > Oscar 2010: The Performances

How top Oscar Winners fared at the box office

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:49:00 +0000

Domestic box-office totals through February for the most-honored films at the 82nd annual Academy Awards:

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MOVIE: "The Hurt Locker," Summit Entertainment.

OSCARS: Six, including best picture and director.

RELEASED: June.

BOX OFFICE: $12.7 million so far.

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MOVIE: "Avatar," 20th Century Fox.

OSCARS: Three, including best art direction and visual effects.

RELEASED: December.

BOX OFFICE: $706 million so far.

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MOVIE: "Crazy Heart," 20th Century Fox.

OSCARS: Two, including best actor and original song.

RELEASED: December.

BOX OFFICE: $25 million so far.

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MOVIE: "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire." Lionsgate.

OSCARS: Two, including best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay.

RELEASED: November.

BOX OFFICE: $47 million so far.

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MOVIE: "Up," The Walt Disney Co.

OSCARS: Two, including best animated feature and original score.

RELEASED: May.

BOX OFFICE: $293 million so far.

List of winners at the 82nd annual Oscars

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:36:00 +0000

List of winners at the 82nd annual Academy Awards:

-- Motion Picture: "The Hurt Locker."

-- Actor: Jeff Bridges, "Crazy Heart."

-- Actress: Sandra Bullock, "The Blind Side."

-- Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, "Inglourious Basterds."

-- Supporting Actress: Mo'Nique, "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire."

-- Director: Kathryn Bigelow, "The Hurt Locker."

-- Foreign Film: "El Secreto de Sus Ojos," Argentina.

-- Adapted Screenplay: Geoffrey Fletcher, "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire."

-- Original Screenplay: Mark Boal, "The Hurt Locker."

-- Animated Feature Film: "Up."

-- Art Direction: "Avatar."

-- Cinematography: "Avatar."

-- Sound Mixing: "The Hurt Locker."

-- Sound Editing: "The Hurt Locker."

-- Original Score: "Up," Michael Giacchino.

Oscar’s biggest stars: Look closer

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:01:00 +0000

In the weeks leading up to this year's Academy Awards, I put the spotlight on each of the 10 performances nominated in the best-actor and best-actress categories in a series called "Oscar 2010: The Performances." My aim was not to predict who would win, or even to make pronouncements about whom I want to win (though reading between the lines is always encouraged). I wanted to spend a little time looking under the hood of each of those performances, to get a sense of what might be going on there. My methods were highly unscientific, my views wholly subjective. My hope was to get closer to the heart of what makes a good performance good or, when applicable, a bad one bad. At the very least, this series offered a few snapshot assessments of what it is about actors that keeps us going to the movies in the first place, a small window into the pleasure that actors, at their best, are capable of bringing us.

The following slide show offers excerpts of each essay, along with a link to the original.

View the slide show.

Jeff Bridges’ redemption song

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:01:00 +0000

In "Crazy Heart" Jeff Bridges -- who has never won an Oscar, despite the pleasure he's given audiences in a film career that's spanned more than 40 years -- gives a performance that's so comfortably lived-in, it makes you forget there's even such a thing as technique. All performances consist of two basic components: the things an actor does consciously and -- usually the magic ingredient -- the things that emerge as the result of not trying. With Bridges' performance here, as with perhaps nearly every performance he's ever given, it's impossible to locate the seams between the two. Bridges may be acting, but he always makes it look like living.

My love-hate relationship with Meryl Streep

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:20:00 +0000

I don't think it's possible, or even desirable, for moviegoers -- and that includes critics -- to be objective about actors. One of the deepest and most abiding pleasures of moviegoing is responding to performers, and so it makes sense that we often have intense and conflicted personal responses to them. That's what troubles me about the lockstep view of Meryl Streep as the consummate actor's actor, a performer who deserves our lifelong adulation simply because she works so hard at mastering accents. There is no religious tablet -- as far as I know -- that decrees we all need to be in constant awe of Meryl Streep. She can be as dull or as mannered as any other actor currently working, whether she's playing a frayed-at-the-edges modern do-gooder in "The Hours" or a bitchy, power-mad nun from the Order of the Sunbonnets in "Doubt." The former was a performance shaped around a big breakdown moment, the kind of show that's designed to make people say, "Brava!" but doesn't necessarily cut deeply; the latter was a triumph of primly pursed lips and glowering eyes, the kind of turn that makes admirers throw around words like "discipline" and "restraint" -- though when I look at a performance, the last thing I want to be noticing is the discipline.

Oscar 2010: Carey Mulligan’s charm offensive

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

At one point in Lone Scherfig's "An Education" Carey Mulligan, as a 16-year-old schoolgirl whose yearning for culture and sophistication is being stroked by an older man, sits in a posh supper club flanked by this new beau and his two ultra-sophisticated friends. Mulligan's character, Jenny, is a bright girl bucking the constraints of her suburban upbringing; this is early '60s, pre-swinging London, an era when nice girls supposedly didn't (though in actuality they often did). But it's not really sex Jenny is after; what she's seeking is much harder to define. She speaks schoolgirl French, sneaks cigarettes with her friends, and spends hours stretched out dreamily in her room, listening to Juliette Greco records -- records that, in those pre-Amazon days, actually had to be brought back from France in a suitcase by a human being, or at least special-ordered from your local record shop. Jenny is hungry for the world, and that supper-club scene in "An Education" nails it: Sitting at the table with her new friends, her hair done up -- or, rather, undone -- in the nondescript center-part hairdo of schoolgirls everywhere, she's the teenage equivalent of a plane ready for takeoff. Her simple plaid shift dress is accessorized with a dainty heart locket, a cigarette poised delicately between her fingers and -- the killer detail -- dimples.

Oscar 2010: Jeremy Renner dismantles the war hero

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:27:00 +0000

At times Jeremy Renner's performance in "The Hurt Locker" is all fingers, though it's never all thumbs. Sometimes it seems that director Kathryn Bigelow shows more of his hands than of his face: Renner's character, Staff Sgt. William James, is a bomb-squad team leader in Iraq circa 2004. He's just been installed as a replacement for the squad's previous leader (Guy Pearce), who's been killed in action. James is a cowboy, at first annoying and angering his team by the way he takes unnecessary risks when he's disarming bombs. But for all his physical swagger -- he's cock of the walk even when he's suited up in the restrictively padded sand-colored snowsuit worn by bomb specialists -- the essence of his job boils down to what he can do with his hands. We see his slightly stubby fingers tracing a length of colored wire from a safe "here" to a lethal "there," or pulling an explosive mechanism apart the way you might pick at the meat of a chicken wing.

Colin Firth: The elegant mourner

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:01:00 +0000

One of the movie posters for Tom Ford's "A Single Man" is a gauzy photo-illustration featuring a debonair-looking Colin Firth in the foreground -- deep in thought and wearing heavy-rimmed Michael Caine glasses -- as Julianne Moore, a '60s glam queen in a black sheath dress and dangly cocktail-party earrings, looks on with undisguised affection and possibly a shiver of lust. A soft-focus white rose blooms just behind Firth's right ear, a symbol of mourning, or rebirth, or something. It's a dreamy, aesthetically pleasing work of advertising, a respectful nod to the glory days of movie-poster artists like Bob Peak.

This is very elegant advertising for a movie about grief that, if Ford had chosen a different star, might also feel like advertising. Ford has worked as an art director and a fashion designer (for the houses of Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci), and in those fields, his aesthetic sense has proved to be extremely well-turned. But as a piece of moviemaking "A Single Man" -- based on the 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel in which a middle-aged literature professor mourns the death of his lover -- is static and sterile. Ford knows something about composition and lighting, perhaps a bit too much. If it weren't for Firth, its star, "A Single Man" wouldn't amount to much more than a series of meticulously art-directed stills, less a movie than a lavish 10-page promotional insert in Vogue.

Gabourey Sidibe: Playing the victim

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Mo'Nique's performance in "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," as an abusive mother who, among other acts of cruelty, tries to keep her daughter from getting an education so she can stay on welfare, has earned a great deal of praise since the movie's release last November. The performance has been short-listed, by those who obsess about such things, as the surefire winner of the best supporting actress Academy Award.

But of the two most attention-grabbing performances in "Precious," the one that goes deeper, and ultimately has more resonance, is Gabourey Sidibe's turn as Precious, the Harlem teenager whose life is essentially a catalog of the horrors that can befall a young black woman in the inner city.

Oscar, you chose the wrong George Clooney

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:20:00 +0000

In Jason Reitman's "Up in the Air," George Clooney plays a smooth operator who fires people for a living but who must eventually recognize that it's love, family and connection that matter. In Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" Clooney plays a fox who steals chickens for a living but who must eventually recognize that it's love, family and connection that matter. Only one of these performances has been nominated for an Academy Award, and it's the wrong one.

Helen Mirren, a screen siren at 64

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:01:00 +0000

I could watch Helen Mirren in just about anything -- even, it turns out, Michael Hoffman's well-intentioned but overstuffed "The Last Station." Based on Jay Parini's novel of the same name, the movie focuses on the final years of Leo Tolstoy's life (he's played by Christopher Plummer, in a goaty beard that looks to have been attached with spirit gum), specifically on the author's alternately contentious and affectionate relationship with his wife and muse, the Countess Sofya (Mirren). Sofya, who is what we might consider in modern vernacular "a handful," fears that her aged husband, who espouses a philosophy that includes the denunciation of private property, is about to sign a new will that will leave her and the couple's numerous children penniless. She uses her considerable charm to cozy up to Valentin (James McAvoy), a Tolstoy acolyte whom she believes has the power to dissuade the great man from signing his life's work away.

Morgan Freeman: Making Mandela sexy

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:20:00 +0000

Morgan Freeman hasn't just played God; he actually is the voice of God. He has gazed down from heaven upon penguins, narrating the intricacies of their life-and-death struggles; in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds," he reveals, in his all-seeing, all-knowing wisdom, that the invading aliens are dying because they have no immunity to diseases that barely faze humans; and, perhaps most significantly, his is the first voice you hear when you turn on the CBS Evening News. The voice of Morgan Freeman is everywhere; it's like God wallpaper.

Oscar 2010: In defense of Sandra Bullock

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:01:00 +0000

When it comes to thinking about what actors do and how they do it, my least favorite time of year is the four-week period between the Oscar nomination announcements and the actual awards ceremony. It's one thing to talk about the performances of the past year that delighted us, tickled us, intrigued us, distressed us or surprised us. But once those nominations have been slipped under our noses, pondering who might win the best-actor and best-actress awards practically invites snobbery. Part of the problem is right there in the second half of that too-often-used phrase "Oscar-worthy." "Worthiness" is one of those Puritan New England words that suggests a strict, immutable bond between hard work and concomitant rewards. There's only one best-actor and one best-actress Oscar per year. Therefore, the award should go to the performance that the greatest number of people can admit to admiring with the fewest equivocations or apologies. If a performer mastered a difficult accent, had a big, show-stopping monologue, or indulged in the kind of Shakespearean brooding that betrays a history of classical training, that increases his or her chances of being deemed -- by critics, by Oscar pundits, by the public -- as "deserving."