Thursday, December 18, 2003

Will Someone Give Bill Murray An Oscar Already?

The following article is reposted from November 13th. If you have already read it, sorry, please scroll down. I felt the need to redo it because his Golden Globe nomination inches him thismuchcloser to the Big O:

Oscar is fickle about comedians. Oscar eludes those who seek him by inducing soft chuckles. That having been said, will someone give the Oscar to Bill Murray already? His performance in Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation was brilliantly subtle and nuanced. In fact, it was all nuance: an anti-performance.

Imagine a Best Oscar going to an underplayed performance. Denzel Washington's dirty cop was the most powerful and full-on performance in recent years. Adrien Brody was a surprise, but in a sense it was the most fully articulated performance among the nominees last year. It would be wonderful to have Bill Murray's declining Hollywood actor in a foreign land shilling whiskey to win it this time around.

Murray has been snubbed by Oscar. He has never been nominated and that is a crime. Murray was endearing and complex in Rushmore, but again that was a comedy, so he was hurt at the outset. Murray was a rich personality in The Razor's Edge. And Murray was overlooked as the dry, intellectually clueless psychiatrist in The Mighty Tennenbaum's, another comedy, so Oscar ignored.

My favorite Bill Murray flic is Meatballs, which is also the first film I ever saw so there is nothing intellectual about my love of it. To me, Bill Murray is the coolest man on the planet earth.

So give him an Oscar already.


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