the heidi chronicles

Dear Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,

please don't fuck this one up.

love heidi

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disillusioned with those pesky grammys at an early age, i tend to be skeptical of awards shows. it was that damned jethro tull incident. you imagine the let down and betrayal poor little adolescent hair-metal me felt when metallica got slighted (and didn't deserve it yet)... but when i found the rest of the madonna-loving scratching their heads and knitting their brows and mocking the recording academy or whoever for an inability to discern hard rock from prog -

yes prog. ian anderson plays a flute for gods sake.

however, any one who knows me knows i have a bizarre love affair with the oscars.

beginning when i was upset to learn that gary sinese - the ONLY good thing about Forrest Gump if you ask me - lost to martin landau. and i mean UP SET. some years later i would finally see ed wood, and remorse would make it difficult for me to finish it. that thing was landau's hands down. somewhere around 1998 or 1999 that was - whichever year Hillary and Jackie earned a best supporting actress nomination... from that point on, i made it a point to see as many nominated films as i could before the awards to save embarrassing me in front of myself like that again.

i promise i am getting to my point.

in fact, here it comes.

there have been moments when i have been pleasantly surprised (life is beautiful getting was it best actor?, my beloved jim broadbent winning for Iris) and moments i have been seriously disappointed (hello!!!! bill murray!!!!) and for a long time those have seemed to balance one another.

yet more and more i am witnessing a trend... i am sure other people have noticed it and christened with the names of others, but i call it the sean penn syndrome. i hate the sean penn syndrome.

sean penn is a gifted man and a damn good actor. maybe a jackass, but that's beside the point. the penns are a family chock full of it - michael, you'll always be my favorite.

and sean penn has deserved an oscar about eight times in the past that he's either been overlooked on the ballot or just left off altogether. dead man walking. seriously people. and suddenly the academy realizes it and says here... what did he do this year? oh that mystic river movie was great. i mean, he played a character he's played so many times he could have emailed it in, but since tim robbins was so fucking fantastic no one will really notice that we're nominating penn for one of his lesser career performances. that way we can give him an award and stop feeling so stupid. you know - like we did with denzel and that bad cop movie.

which was a great movie. but c'mon. how many people get oscars playing villains? and for that matter - why didn't daniel day lewis?

and thus another tangent.

slowly the familiar sense of disillusionment is closing in. and the final straw is coming.

2001 i said if benicio does not win for Traffic, i will never watch the oscars again.

he did. and i did.

2004 it was mr. tim "heidi's favorite actor in the whole world" robbins and the aforementioned Mystic River (in which he and marcia gay harding were the true bright spots).

he won and here i am.

and this time i really mean it.

and if felicity huffman doesn't win, i will not care about the oscars ever again.

four amazingly talented women are nominated with her, and i mean not to discredit them. but what she accomplished in Transamerica is above and beyond anything I have ever imagined an actress could do. a woman playing a man who s struggling to become a woman. sounds simple at first. yet if you contemplate that... it makes my brain want to explode.

once - when i was an actress - i had to play a woman pretending to be a man. and that shit wiped me out. learning to walk like a man. struggling to keep my voice low. much less focus on my character and storyline. seperate rehearsals were set up just for me.

take that and then put fighting all of those things and making it look like a fight convincingly on top. that, ladies and gentlemen, ain't a job for no daytime soap opera actress. there can be no woman playing a woman... no skipping that (pardon the pun) middle man.

and that she pulls it off so beautifully. goddamit she is... the word amazing does no justice.

judi dench i love you and Mrs. henderson is one of the best films i have seen in a while. they owe you for Iris. but not this year.

keira knightly is beautiful and it's nice to see her in a role where that is clearly not the selling point, and to see her play it so smartly and elegantly. someday she's gonna be nominated and there will be no competition to speak of. but she has time.

charlize, you won one when you truly deserved it. i don't know that you can match that again.

and reese, its the best thing i have seen you do, but tweaking your accent and channeling june cater cash - no matter how spot on you managed it - still isn't pulling off what mrs. macy has.

i feel more strongly about this than i have any oscar race before - even about bill murray's being snubbed for the role OF HIS LIFE.

i have my favorites elsewhere on the nominee list, too. but if phillip seymour hoffman loses to david straitham, he and i will both be ok with that. and i am hard pressed to pick a favorite amongst the supporting actresses. (i never thought i'd see the day i wanted george clooney to get an oscar, but that day is today...)

however, my strongest feelings lie with felicity.

break a leg, lady.

posted by trixievw @ 9:34 PM