Let me get this out of the way first: Jeff Bridges absolutely deserves his Oscar nomination for his performance in Crazy Heart.  He’s always been a favorite of mine, ever since his enigmatic, incomprehensible performance in 1993’s Fearless, and he is superb in this film.  He plays Bad Blake, a broken-down alcoholic, a former country superstar gone to seed, and he lives the role as if he were born to play it.  He’s a stumbling drunk, a songwriting genius, a charming, nice guy who is also totally self-centered, a rogue and a walking dead man.  It’s a great acting performance.

That’s the good: now the bad.  The movie is intense, often painfully so, and if you have a history of alcoholism in your family, some of the scenes are going to make you uncomfortable.  At least they did me, but that may be partially the result of natural sensitivities in addition to my own family history.   Some parts of the movie were HARD.

A surprising delight was Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean, a single mom who falls into Bad Blake’s universe, and, even after a lifetime of bad decisions, continues to make them, to near-catastrophic effect.  I won’t give up the plot line, but Jeanie says at one point that having a relationship with an alcoholic is “like living with a rattlesnake”, and her family feels the bite.  She’s a surprisingly beautiful actress and exudes a sensuality that I’d missed in the other roles I’ve seen her in.  Her characterization runs the wire – from frank and strong to weak and vulnerable, angry and tender and needy and distant.  She deserves her Best Supporting Actress nomination and I hope she wins it (although Vera Farmiga in Up In The Air was spectacular also).

I’m not 100% convinced yet that the ending is the one I would have hoped for.  Again, without giving too much away, I feel it could have been more dramatic and of a piece with the rest of the story.  The movie is based on the book by Thomas Cobb, so I assume it follows more or less faithfully the plot line of the novel, but still…

Worth seeing?  Absolutely.  The acting performances are amazing.  I’m surprised that the movie wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, in a year that has Inglorious Basterds, Up, and A Serious Man among the Best Picture nominees – all of which I panned in various ways.

My main picks for the Oscars all came true!  I’m a cognoscenti now.  Here are the winners that I’d previously predicted:

Best Picture: No Country For Old Men.  I had this one pegged back in early January

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis.  Very hard to beat at his best, which I noted in the same article.

Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem.  See my review of his performance in No Country For Old Men here.

Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton.  Michael Clayton really brought out her finest work in a long time.  A very well deserved award!

And, to allow you to fully probe the depths of my Oscar prognosticating goodness, I predicted after I saw it that Ratatouille would win the Best Animated Film Oscar.  You could see that one coming a mile off, it was that good.

I missed on Best Director – I thought it would probably go to Paul Thomas Anderson for There Will Be Blood, but it went to Joel & Ethan Coen.

Congratulations to all the winners!  I had a decent year in 2007 with the best pictures.

As I predicted, both No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood received Best Picture nominations today. See my reviews for these movies here and here.

More suprising (but welcome) was the inclusion of Michael Clayton with seven nods, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor.  Most deserved was the nomination for Tilda Swinton for Best Supporting Actress.  I really enjoyed this movie and am glad to see it got the recognition it deserved.

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Tags: Oscars, No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton