Someone asked me if
Philip Seymour Hoffman deserved the Oscars after I watched Capote. I do not have sufficient grounds to concur or differ. The only other nomination I had watched was
Ledger in Broke Back Mountain.
[By nominations, I refer to those five on the Oscars List among many other powerful performances which had been eliminated from the honor’s roll. If I rummage through the names the judges has discarded, who perhaps would I find among those discarded?]
Between the two, I can say this. Ledger’s performance was not so much a studied homework. Lee Ang seem to have brought out the emotional dimension within Ledger, which mirrored the emotional demon the character was so consumed by. Ledger’s performance was an
emotional tour de force, and I had always found emotional tour de force performance, romantic.
Hoffman’s was that of a flawless piece of
method-acting with the character. He was mesmerizing to watch, right down to the movement of the pupils of his eyes.
The fleshiest theme in Capote was where do truth ends and lies begin, of which, Hoffman portrayed to such convincing tone, I would think that future impressions of who Capote was may be taking reference from this performance.
Thank god Hoffman once spoke about having a sense of responsibility about the persons you play: the struggle between his morals for the murderers and his manipulative passion for his novel keeps you mesmerized to the end more than the truth behind the murders.
Yet, I had always preferred to think of an actor’s craft as a showcase of the depth of their emotional connection. The more emotional charged his performance, the more emotional investment one could see would exhaust the actor in his portrayal, the more I would tip my vote as a better actor towards his ballot box. Yes I know;
I don’t think with my head.
If it is your time to win, it is best to win it without controversy by any segment of the audience, if not, it is best, and not, your time to win: a paraphrase of, Lee Ang’s response to the challenge if he would win Oscars prior to the award ceremony.
Hidden within the laidback tone of Lee Ang’s answer, is a challenge: One which would be thrown to the critics who cast the winning votes. How does one find the uncontested measurement to award a nominee? But of course, Oscars is nothing without contest in the choice of measurement employed to award winners.
The performances used for nomination in the Oscars are limited to a single year. In contrast, one of the surest measurements of an actor’s skill is what film language calls oeuvre. In English, it refers to a collection of work from which we could cite as examples of excellent performances.
If a actor is only brilliant in a single performance, I often wonder if it was the good script, good directing, and good co-actors that carried the excellence for the actor in question. Unless he has consistency in a varied number of previous roles, I wouldn’t be so quick to name an actor a best actor.
Immediately, if oeuvre is the measure of a good actor, then the limitation of a single year turns the Best Actor category in awards ceremonies immaterial. The greatness of an actor is beyond a single Oscars. If oeuvre is the measure of a good actor, therefore to qualify one actor as the better of another, we must study the oeuvre of the other actor too….
You see, being a good critic requires homework done, also. Actors like Hoffman understands the responsibility of actors playing the characters they play; playing critic should carry the responsibility of knowing the works of your actors.
Playing critic requires a humbling heart: only then will you have the thirst to find out thoroughly, and not on your smart-aleck presumptions and assumptions.
*So spank me if u think i am flawed*
Below is a link to a list of works for both Hoffman and Ledger. Do take some time to see how far both have come as actors in their own right.
Ledger
Hoffman
Many blogs are guilty as charged for being fragmentary. The sentence made against blogs are that it is composed whimsically, a reflection of the mood of that particular day.
I will attempt to bring some cohesiveness to my collection of blogs, linking blogs of similar nature so u have breadth ans well as depth browsing.
Paying it Forward
