Best Actor 2005

1998 through 2007

Best Actor 2005

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
5
14%
Terrence Howard, Hustle & Flow
0
No votes
Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain
24
65%
Joaquin Phoenix, Walk the Line
0
No votes
David Straitharn, Good Night, and Good Luck
8
22%
 
Total votes: 37

ksrymy
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by ksrymy »

The Best Actress 2010 post was made on the 41st and Other 9th Decade discussion board to stave us over these past few days.
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Uri
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by Uri »

Damien wrote:
Uri wrote:Ahm.

I couldn't agree with you more as far as your first paragraph goes, couldn't agree with you less when it comes to the second one. Many years ago there was this theatre in Tel Aviv where during the weekend they used to screen a different movie every couple of hours. One time I took a group of people to see DL and V back to back as a kind of a speed course in what a cinematic interpretation is. We all preferred Frears' though, brittle approach to Forman's mellow, forgiving and wrongly humanistic one.
That's interesting -- what a cool immersion. I actually like both, without being enamored of either. (Both are 3 star movies for me.) I respect the intelligence and with of the Frears but also like -- and probably slightly -- the Forman's warmth that's adjunct to the amoral proceedings. But I most always prefer humanism over detached cynicism, and it's why I'll take Leo McCarey (and Mitchell Leisen, for that matter) over Billy Wilder any day.
You certainly exposed me – following your guidelines, I'm most definitely a Wilderian or, as in the fashion on this board, a Wilderianite.

And there really must be something cultural about it, or even more accurately, a heritage oriented one. From Kafka to Kokoschka, this cynical, seemingly misanthropic, often self deprecating approach is very typical of what can roughly be described as Central European Jewish sensitivity, that of many writers and artists who came from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and indeed Galicia, Wilder's birthplace. It's all about desperately wanting to be recognized as part of the German speaking civilization, the epitome of modern, enlighten and advanced thinking culture, while always being perfectly aware of never being fully accepted. Ironically, this culture was in many ways the creation of these outsiders and in a way an utopian one, obviously. Being an early 20th century modern Polish Jew meant one whished to associate oneself with this culture rather than with the traditional Eastern European schteitel oriented one. As a result we, Polish Jews are famous for being constantly bitter and unrelenting, especially when it comes to judging our fellow human beings. Here in Israel we have an enormous arsenal of jokes about the (Jewish) Polish woman, and they're mostly about her lack of ability to accept other people being happy (particularly her poor husband). Christian compassion is quite a foreign notion to us, I'm afraid.

Interestingly, Milos Forman, whose similar cultural background is that of Hasek and Kundera, the longer his stay in Hollywood, the more forgiving his take on human nature seems to be.
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by Big Magilla »

[quote="ITALIANO]I don't know, it's probably a sacrilege by American standards, but I'm not sure that "looking like the real-life person", perfectly imitating him or her, is necessary - it certainly doesn't have anything to do with giving a good performance. It's movies we are talking about, not wax museums, and if one has to look for truth in movies, this truth should certainly be deeper than just a superficial copy of gestures and looks. This is why, for example, I never understood Jon Voight's nomination for Ali - he may have perfectly looked like the man he played - whom I had never heard of - but still it wasn't a performance, or at least not one worthy of an Oscar nod.[/quote]

Not necessary, and if we didn't have Toby Jones (who is British, not American) to compare Hoffman to, it wouldn't be an issue, but Jones provides both a great imitation and a wonderful lived -in performance. His is the better performance in the lesser film, but that really shouldn't be an issue either because Jones' performance was unseen at time of the 2005 awards. Two of Hoffman's copetitors, David Strahairn and Joaquin Phoenix were playing people well-known to their films' audiences as well, and neither looked remotely like the people they were playing either.

I don't recall much of Ali, but I don't think Voight looked or sounded like the real Howard Cossell, an annoying, pompous, loud-mouthed know-it-all, but he got the swagger right.

Cossell used to hold court seemingly every day on 50th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue in New York when I worked in the building there in the 70s. He was very big at the time. It was the same builidng the Muscular Dystrophy Association had its offices in. I used to see many celebrities in the area, many of whom I have fond memories of, but Cossell and Jerry Lewis, both of whom were always "on" were extremely annoying. Running into Lewis was worse, because you couldn't get away from him when you were on the same elevator, but Cossell you could always walk around. Couldn't get away from that grating voice, though. It carried and carried.
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by Big Magilla »

ksrymy wrote:Should I post something tomorrow or, since Sabin posted early, should I wait 'til Sunday?
I think we shuld stick to two a week - it drives some people crazy when we rush these things. Some people do schedule screenings of films for a particular year prior to the expected poll date.

You could do the Best Actress and Supporting Actress polls for 2010 in the interim if you want.
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by ITALIANO »

Sabin wrote:
Italiano wrote
It's easy today to see Heath Ledger's performance as the one which was unfairly overlooked on Oscar night. Some - not on this board - even rewrite history and there's this urban legend that Philip Seymour Hoffman's win was a shocking surprise. It wasn't, of course - he was expected to win, and Ledger never had a chance.
I think this is because Capote opened, grabbed strong reviews, did modest business, and then left theaters. Before January 16th and the night of the Golden Globes, Heath Ledger had won about half the awards that Philip Seymour Hoffman did but to my eyes at least looked like a stronger front-runner to best him for Best Dramatic Actor, considering that Brokeback Mountain had seven nominations and Capote had but one. Hoffman's win was rather surprising, and the actor himself delivered and incredibly rambling, unprepared speech. It wasn't until Hoffman's Golden Globe win that the juggernaut really began.

Yes, well, it's also true that Ledger was more the Golden-Globe-winner type, so this may partly explain Hoffman's surprise and unprepared speech. By Oscar night, we all knew he'd win.

Plus, I don't know, it's probably a sacrilege by American standards, but I'm not sure that "looking like the real-life person", perfectly imitating him or her, is necessary - it certainly doesn't have anything to do with giving a good performance. It's movies we are talking about, not wax museums, and if one has to look for truth in movies, this truth should certainly be deeper than just a superficial copy of gestures and looks. This is why, for example, I never understood Jon Voight's nomination for Ali - he may have perfectly looked like the man he played - whom I had never heard of - but still it wasn't a performance, or at least not one worthy of an Oscar nod.
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by Damien »

Uri wrote:Ahm.

I couldn't agree with you more as far as your first paragraph goes, couldn't agree with you less when it comes to the second one. Many years ago there was this theatre in Tel Aviv where during the weekend they used to screen a different movie every couple of hours. One time I took a group of people to see DL and V back to back as a kind of a speed course in what a cinematic interpretation is. We all preferred Frears' though, brittle approach to Forman's mellow, forgiving and wrongly humanistic one.
That's interesting -- what a cool immersion. I actually like both, without being enamored of either. (Both are 3 star movies for me.) I respect the intelligence and with of the Frears but also like -- and probably slightly -- the Forman's warmth that's adjunct to the amoral proceedings. But I most always prefer humanism over detached cynicism, and it's why I'll take Leo McCarey (and Mitchell Leisen, for that matter) over Billy Wilder any day.
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by The Original BJ »

My vote is Sunday.
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by ksrymy »

Should I post something tomorrow or, since Sabin posted early, should I wait 'til Sunday?
"Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Big Magilla
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by Big Magilla »

[/quote]Capote had five nominations: Picture, Director (Bennett Miller), Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Supporting Actress (Catherine Keener), and Adapted Screenplay (Dan Futterman).[/quote]

Sabin was referring to the Globes where it only received the one nomination for Hoffman's performance.
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by FilmFan720 »

ksrymy wrote:
Sabin wrote:
Italiano wrote
It's easy today to see Heath Ledger's performance as the one which was unfairly overlooked on Oscar night. Some - not on this board - even rewrite history and there's this urban legend that Philip Seymour Hoffman's win was a shocking surprise. It wasn't, of course - he was expected to win, and Ledger never had a chance.
I think this is because Capote opened, grabbed strong reviews, did modest business, and then left theaters. Before January 16th and the night of the Golden Globes, Heath Ledger had won about half the awards that Philip Seymour Hoffman did but to my eyes at least looked like a stronger front-runner to best him for Best Dramatic Actor, considering that Brokeback Mountain had seven nominations and Capote had but one. Hoffman's win was rather surprising, and the actor himself delivered and incredibly rambling, unprepared speech. It wasn't until Hoffman's Golden Globe win that the juggernaut really began.
Capote had five nominations: Picture, Director (Bennett Miller), Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Supporting Actress (Catherine Keener), and Adapted Screenplay (Dan Futterman).
He was talking about the Golden Globes
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ksrymy
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by ksrymy »

Sabin wrote:
Italiano wrote
It's easy today to see Heath Ledger's performance as the one which was unfairly overlooked on Oscar night. Some - not on this board - even rewrite history and there's this urban legend that Philip Seymour Hoffman's win was a shocking surprise. It wasn't, of course - he was expected to win, and Ledger never had a chance.
I think this is because Capote opened, grabbed strong reviews, did modest business, and then left theaters. Before January 16th and the night of the Golden Globes, Heath Ledger had won about half the awards that Philip Seymour Hoffman did but to my eyes at least looked like a stronger front-runner to best him for Best Dramatic Actor, considering that Brokeback Mountain had seven nominations and Capote had but one. Hoffman's win was rather surprising, and the actor himself delivered and incredibly rambling, unprepared speech. It wasn't until Hoffman's Golden Globe win that the juggernaut really began.
Capote had five nominations: Picture, Director (Bennett Miller), Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Supporting Actress (Catherine Keener), and Adapted Screenplay (Dan Futterman).
"Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by Bruce_Lavigne »

Phoenix is by far my least favorite of these nominees, not even in my top ten for the year... and he's absolutely fantastic in Walk the Line. That's how strong 2005 was for lead actors, and to my delight, four of my five personal picks made the actual nominees list.

Howard had as strong a breakthrough role in Hustle & Flow as I've ever seen. Loved his performance in a movie I actually like. Strathairn has already been sufficiently praised here, so I have no further to go on that.

I'm with Uri in my lack of exposure to the real Truman Capote; in my case, this is due not to geography but to age, as Capote died less than a year after I was born. I therefore have little basis for judging Hoffman's performance as an impersonation; I know what the guy sounded like (which Hoffman captures perfectly well enough for me) and what he looked like (which Hoffman gets right as well as any biopic performer ever does), but the older board members might be surprised just how tiny a minority that puts me in among even those of my generation who are familiar with his literary work. In any case, Hoffman is one of those actors who gives the impression of an entire life having been lived before the movie started, and he does that in Capote as well as anywhere, not to mention physically transforming himself as much as possible into the least likely person he could have played in a biopic. Toby Jones may have been much more "right" for the role physically, and might've done a much more accurate impersonation in Infamous, but didn't create nearly as interesting a character. Credit there is probably due to Capote as a movie, which more or less puts the author's well-documented gadfly charm on the back burner in favor of exploring the moral compromises that he had to make to create a celebrated work of literature, given said work's being built on the lives of real, living people. I don't know; maybe that didn't play well to people who just wanted to see a cinematic re-creation of the charismatic media personality they remember from talk shows of earlier decades, but it worked perfectly well for me.

He's my second runner-up, though. Strathairn is just a bit better, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Ledger was the best of an incredibly strong year at the time, even if every precursor seemed to make him an ever more distant runner-up in the actual Oscar race. The fact that we now know this was actually a career peak, and not just the first of many such great performances to come, makes a win for him here all the more well-deserved, but at the time, with a bright cinematic future seemingly in front of him, he was still the best of the bunch.


My top 5:
1. Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain
2. Jeff Daniels, The Squid and the Whale
3. David Strathairn, Good Night, and Good Luck
4. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
5. Terrence Howard, Hustle & Flow

My next 5, which could very easily make a better top 5 than most years:
6. Daniel Day-Lewis, The Ballad of Jack and Rose
7. Damian Lewis, Keane
8. Ralph Fiennes, The Constant Gardener
9. Viggo Mortensen, A History of Violence
10. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mysterious Skin

And then there's Cillian Murphy in Breakfast on Pluto, Phoenix, Tommy Lee Jones and Barry Pepper in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Tom Wilkinson in Separate Lies, Jesse Eisenberg in The Squid and the Whale, and Pierce Brosnan in The Matador, and you've got one of the best years ever for this category, IMO.
Last edited by Bruce_Lavigne on Wed Oct 19, 2011 11:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Sabin
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by Sabin »

Italiano wrote
It's easy today to see Heath Ledger's performance as the one which was unfairly overlooked on Oscar night. Some - not on this board - even rewrite history and there's this urban legend that Philip Seymour Hoffman's win was a shocking surprise. It wasn't, of course - he was expected to win, and Ledger never had a chance.
I think this is because Capote opened, grabbed strong reviews, did modest business, and then left theaters. Before January 16th and the night of the Golden Globes, Heath Ledger had won about half the awards that Philip Seymour Hoffman did but to my eyes at least looked like a stronger front-runner to best him for Best Dramatic Actor, considering that Brokeback Mountain had seven nominations and Capote had but one. Hoffman's win was rather surprising, and the actor himself delivered and incredibly rambling, unprepared speech. It wasn't until Hoffman's Golden Globe win that the juggernaut really began.
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by mlrg »

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
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Re: Best Actor 2005

Post by ITALIANO »

I shouldn't have voted, as I have only seen bits of Howard's movie on tv. And in a way I haven't really voted - or at least I haven't voted for one of the two obvious front-runners in this poll.

It's easy today to see Heath Ledger's performance as the one which was unfairly overlooked on Oscar night. Some - not on this board - even rewrite history and there's this urban legend that Philip Seymour Hoffman's win was a shocking surprise. It wasn't, of course - he was expected to win, and Ledger never had a chance. Ledger was a good, young actor, the kind of good, young actor that the Academy would have honored soon - as it actually happened - but not at his first nomination. He had this wonderful character in Brokeback Mountain, and did very well with it, but we can't deny that the fact that he sadly died so young plays a role, an emotional role, in so many thinking that he was the absolute best of the year.

So, emotions aside, for me it's between those two more seasoned performers, Hoffman and Strathairn - giving two completely diferent performances, but both extremely expert, extremely competent, and even more importantly both true actors, of the kind which rarely gets nominated in the Leading category, and almost never wins. And since nobody seemed to vote for Hoffman, I've picked him - but Strathairn would be a very good choice too.
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