OVP: The Conversation (1974)

Film: The Conversation (1974)

Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Harrison Ford's public persona has long been of a man who didn't really want to be a movie star.  A lot of this, I have long-suspected, is at least partially untrue (otherwise why do it, especially when he became bonkers rich & didn't really need to do it anymore...after all, his wife is also a talented actor who now rarely works).  But it is interesting that Ford's fame came relatively late.  The role that made him a movie star was Star Wars, which was released just days before his 35th birthday. For comparison's sake with some of his 1970's peers, Al Pacino at that age had several Oscar nominations and the Godfather franchise, Dustin Hoffman had been Ben Braddock & Ratso Rizzo, and Jack Nicholson & Peter Fonda had both boarded a motorcycle into legend.  Ford spent much of the 1970's balancing his time between small roles in movies and making furniture for people like Joan Didion, Valerie Harper, & George Lucas.  Ford's movie career, though, is really interesting because he appeared in a lot of interesting movies, among them Michelangelo Antonioni's controversial Zabriskie Point, and three Best Picture nominees: American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and today's film The Conversation.  For all of the talk about Ford at one point before Han Solo nearly quitting the industry to work as a high-profile carpenter, the more intriguing idea might be what he did in this film: taking on the role of distinctive, very handsome character actor in important auteur-driven features.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Conversation is a movie best headed into with you knowing as little as is humanly possible, so while I provide a spoiler alert on all of my reviews because I generally want to know as little as possible about all movies I'm going to, this one in particular it helps to go in blind so I'll reiterate that now.  The movie follows Harry Caul (Hackman), a man who runs a service that essentially follows people and records them for money (it is not lost on me that The Conversation, which competed with Chinatown for Best Picture in 1974, bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Polanski film as both are about private investigators who uncover more than they expected from a routine case).  Unlike Jake Gittes, Harry Caul does not advertise and is not well-known for his work.  He is, instead, anonymous to the point of unhealthy, keeping everything about him at a distance to the point his girlfriend (Garr) doesn't ever visit his apartment and he doesn't even have his own phone.  This is driven by wanting to avoid retribution, but also the very real threat of violence in his career.  Similar to Chinatown (again) there are allusions to a previous case throughout the film that the audience only understands to be too horrific to mention, and that haunt both detectives to the point they are constantly in fear of repeating it.

The Conversation is considered a landmark film, but because Francis Ford Coppola had it come out the same year The Godfather, Part II (one of the greatest movies ever made), it always feels like it doesn't get its due, and so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect headed into this-would it be a really handsome movie, one that stands up but can't compare with a picture as perfect as Godfather II, or would it be just as exceptional.  Again, similar to Chinatown, it's not clear until the last moments what's happening, and it's also not clear where The Conversation will land in that comparison.  But as the movie concludes, you realize it's also a true masterpiece.  We understand as the film ends that Harry has no idea what he's walked into, and what he's helped cause.  He assumes that the conversation between Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams at the beginning of the movie is of a couple that might be having an affair, and becomes concerned when he uncovers (while listening to the clips that he initially won't hand over to a man known as "the Director's" assistant without first meeting the Director himself) that a part of the clips that he couldn't initially hear says "he'd kill us if he got the chance."  When he meets the Director (played by an uncredited Robert Duvall) he becomes worried for the young couple's safety as it's clear Cindy Williams is the Director's wife.  But as we learn in the waning moments of the film, he's missed something on the tapes-the emphasis in Forrest's reading of the word "us."

Because as the film ends, it's a case where Frederic Forrest has murdered Robert Duvall's husband with help from his lover, leaving all of the money (and secret organization he has) to Cindy Williams, and leaving them the opportunity to end up together.  The movie's sound work is legendary (and Oscar-nominated) for a reason, as not only is the entire setup with Hackman's Harry filled with us getting whirs & blurs from the recording equipment, but also the film tells in flashback narrative things the audience will have missed.  The film clearly inspired everything from The Usual Suspects to Severance (which borrows heavily from The Conversation's score), and you see why-this is a movie that shows paranoia is justified...and cannot be resolved.  We end the movie with Harry knowing he is being watched, knowing that he can't escape or be safely private...and having to give in to that to not go mad.

Harrison Ford's role is a key component & a crucial part of this story, even if he's only in about three scenes.  He plays the Director's assistant, and plays him with a level of bureaucratic cool that you kind of just assume he's a jackass (also according to most reports, Ford played him as gay which kind of comes across in the way he's super bitchy in a way you don't find a male character in the 1970's, even if there's no hint of this other than him wearing a stylish green suit in one scene that Ford bought with his own money), one who has gotten to this position through being absurdly handsome and honestly it's the sort of character you assume you don't need to pay attention to as the movie progresses.  Because I am writing this about Ford, though, I was paying attention, and it gives you a whole other angle here.  Ford's Martin Stett is the only figure in the film who 100% knows everything that's going on we learn as the film goes by-he works for the Director, but he's also clearly aware of the affair, and given that he's still working for Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams in the end, it's possible he orchestrated all of this in connection with them.  The paranoia seeps into the actual film...was this all a setup to use Harry, kill the Director, and give the young couple everything they wanted?  Only Ford's Stett, who calls Hackman in the end to tell him he's being watched, knows for certain, and makes him the true antagonist of the picture.  Ford is good in this, and as we'll talk about next week, that layered acting ability didn't totally diminish when his visage started to adorn the postered walls of teenage boys, but as I said above-it's hard not to think of Ford in the same way we think of someone like Robert Duvall or John Cazale, someone who added extra layers to already great movies, as a supporting character actor, while watching The Conversation.

Robert Duvall (1931-2026)

Robert Duvall is one of those actors whose career was longer than you think at first blush.  Watching The Twilight Zone marathon this past New Year's Eve, as I do every year, I was struck by this as I got to the episode "Miniature."  The episode is not famous in the way "To Serve Man" or "Eye of the Beholder" are, and likely only known to the most devoted of Twilight Zone aficionados because for parts of its syndication it wasn't even available (if you ever want to get into a strange Wikipedia wormhole, look up the history of The Twilight Zone in syndication), but it is notable because it starred future Oscar winner Robert Duvall, who passed away yesterday.

I bring this up because it's oftentimes forgotten just how long Robert Duvall's career has been.  Duvall, like many actors of his generation, got his start in stage (and before that, the military), but his screen work begins earlier.  Watch old reruns of not just The Twilight Zone, but Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, or even The Mod Squad, and Duvall will pop up in an episode or two.  That was the thing about Duvall-he's the kind of actor who switched seamlessly from lead roles, including Oscar-nominated turns in stuff like Tender Mercies, The Great Santini, & The Apostle, to being in supporting parts where he added depth like Apocalypse Now, A Civil Action, & Network.  And given he made his screen debut as the memorable Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, his costars numbered Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen, John Wayne, & Burt Lancaster...but also Colin Farrell, Reese Witherspoon, Christian Bale, & Adam Sandler.  He served, like many actors of his New Hollywood ilk (he was once roommates with Gene Hackman & James Caan, who preceded him in death), as a bridge between Classical Hollywood and a generation of movie stars dwarfed by special effects, his sturdy, lasting presence a continual reminder that generational talent will always find a way of pushing itself forward.

For me, and for many, though, he will perpetually be Tom Hagen.  It seems glib to reduce a filmography as diverse as Duvall's down to one role, but if you do...it's gotta be the sturdy, steady-handed Tom at the center of the storm of The Godfather series.  Watch it again (because it's always a good time to watch The Godfather again), and notice it from Tom's perspective.  The quiet resolve in Tom's character, a man without a family, trying to prove to his surrogate brothers that he belongs (even if he knows on some level he never truly will).  Duvall got his first Oscar nomination for this performance, and man is it deserved-it's a testament to how much he adds to the series that even Francis Ford Coppola admitted that The Godfather, Part III was a lesser movie without Duvall present.  In recent years we've lost Duvall, Caan, and Diane Keaton from the storied cast of the defining film of New Hollywood, adding yet another melancholy air to a film upon which these actors already had richly bestowed so much gravitas already.

1972 Oscar Viewing Project

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OVP: True Grit (1969)

Film: True Grit (1969)

Stars: John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Kim Darby, Jeremy Slate, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Corey

Director: Henry Hathaway

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Actor-John Wayne*, Original Song-"True Grit")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We talked a lot about John Wayne's career renaissance last week, with a focus on how Wayne was able to make some of the best movies of his career in the late 1950's & early 1960's by skewering or playing with the mold of his career.  That didn't, however, get him Hollywood's top prize.  Despite being a near constant presence in Best Picture nominees like Stagecoach, The Quiet Man, The Alamo, and How the West Was Won, Wayne was only ever cited for acting once prior to 1969, for his work in 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima (he lost to Broderick Crawford).  By 1969, it was clear that Wayne was starting to age, and the system that had made him a legend had collapsed.  True Grit, a massive hit in a year where traditional Hollywood fare was bombing while New Hollywood pictures were resonating with audiences, was a last gasp chance to give Wayne an Oscar, and AMPAS took it.  It is amusing to me that John Wayne, the conservative embodiment of a past generation, won his only Oscar on the same night as Midnight Cowboy, the lone X-rated film to ever win an Academy Award (a film that he probably hated).  Even the Duke knew he was getting this as a career achievement award more than anything else.  As a visibly moved Wayne accepted his statue from Barbra Streisand, he said "if I'd know that, I'd have put that patch on 35 years earlier"...understanding that it was perhaps the 35 years & not the eyepatch that had gotten him to that stage after decades of trying to reach it.

(Spoilers Ahead) True Grit is not really the tale of Wayne's Rooster Cogburn, but of Mattie Ross (Darby), a young girl who is attempting to avenge the death of her father Frank Ross, who was killed by a man named Tom Chaney (Corey).  She looks for someone to bring him in, picking Cogburn to track down Chaney, and offers to pay him, but with the proviso that she wants to come with him, sporting her father's gun along the way.  Initially he refuses, despite needing the money, and tries to abandon her at one point, but after she fords a river (in an impressive show of strength for Darby & the horse), she is allowed to join, along with La Bouef (Campbell), a handsome but dim-witted man who is familiar with Chaney.  Along the way, they meet a number of men connected to Chaney, including small parts played by Dennis Hopper & Robert Duvall quite early in both of their careers (this would've been the same year that Hopper was becoming a household name in Easy Rider), but eventually find Chaney & kill him, though in the process Mattie is injured and La Bouef killed.  The film ends with Mattie promising that she'll bury Rooster Cogburn in her family plot, meaning he now finally has a family of his own.

The movie, I'm sorry to say, is not good.  I didn't like the remake of this by the Coen Brothers, but by comparison that is better, largely because Hailee Steinfeld is not super annoying in that movie.  Darby's Mattie Ross, as I said, is the true central character of the film, but like most parts portraying children at the time (in real life, Darby would've been 21 when this movie was filmed), she is defiant and stringent in this role, and doesn't really have any sense of humanity.  There's a running joke about her wanting to refer everyone to her lawyer that goes nowhere, to the point where you aren't entirely sure it's supposed to be a joke by the film's end.  Darby left me cold.

The same could be said for Wayne, though in a different way.  As you might've been able to guess four weeks into our look at Wayne, despite the actor's complicated politics, I'm a fan.  Wayne had a sturdiness in his pictures that I find really watchable, and when he's great, he is really something to behold.  Given this won an Oscar for Best Actor, I was hoping for one of those special moments from Wayne, but I didn't get it.  This isn't bad, necessarily, but it's not good enough for an Oscar nomination.  John Wayne deserved an Academy Award at some point in his career, and so I'm glad he got one, but when we get to this year in the Oscar Viewing Project, don't expect to see Wayne's name show up-there were considerably better choices.  The film is pretty much a standard-issue Wayne western, not special in any way except for the title song, beautifully sung by one of my favorite singers (his costar Glen Campbell), which swells and is lovingly used throughout the film's score, and would become synonymous with Wayne in the decades that followed.

OVP: The Great Santini (1979)

Film: The Great Santini (1979)

Stars: Robert Duvall, Blythe Danner, Michael O'Keefe, Stan Shaw, Lisa Jane Persky

Director: Lewis John Carlino

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actor-Robert Duvall, Best Supporting Actor-Michael O'Keefe, for the 1980 Oscars rather than '79, hence the tag discrepancy with the year above, in case you're eagle-eyed & noticed that)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Movies like Casablanca are celebrated for countless reasons.  They're brilliantly written, acted, directed, scored...they come together beautifully.  But there's also a bit of luck about movies like Casablanca, classics that are not just celebrated in their time, but endure years later.  It's easy to forget now, but Casablanca was made during World War II...there was no assurance either during its production or even upon its release that the Americans were going to win the War.  We see that film now as a triumphant call to victory, but that wasn't the case at the time.  A film being timeless is up to chance, and sometimes movies that are great in their moment age horribly, either because the history their ending projects didn't come-to-be, or the message of the film is clouded by our later changes in what we consider politically-correct or appropriate.  I was struck by this while watching The Great Santini, a film from the very late 1970's that won two Academy Award nominations for acting, but in the light of the 21st Century, feels like something darker than what the director wanted to show onscreen.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the early 1960's, before the dawn of the Vietnam conflict, and is about a military family headed by "Bull" Meechum (Duvall) who prefers to go by the moniker "TheGreat Santini" amongst his fellow Marines.  Bull runs his family, including wife Lil (Danner) and eldest son Ben (O'Keefe) like it's a military unit, and it's clear that Bull struggles with being a warrior in peacetime.  As the film progresses, we spend alternating time between Bull, who doesn't fit in with a new generation of recruits who don't have memories of previous wars, and Ben, who is becoming his own man, befriending a local African-American student named Toomer (Shaw), who is ridiculed by racist white classmates, and generally starting to understand the shadow his father's constant pressure & ridicule has brought to him.  As the film goes on, we start to see Ben attempt (largely unsuccessfully) to merge his love for his father with his fears about the man whom he cannot escape, and who has created a constant pressure in his life.  The film takes a sharp turn in its final act (wasn't kidding about those spoilers so drop out now if you need to), when in a routine flying mission, Bull's plane crashes and he dies, with his son getting the release of being freed of his father, but without the closure of doing so on his own terms.  The family must go forward without Bull, with Ben taking up his place as the "man of the house" like Bull initially intended.

The Great Santini is one of many films from the 1970's to try & tackle the issue of a robust father figure, burdened by the expectations of toxic masculinity, with a more sensitive young son who questions the previous generation's gender norms.  Most modern readings of this relationship is that the father needs to change, that his unhealthy control is bordering on abuse, and in some scenes of the film (when he hits his wife & emotionally berates Ben), it's actual abuse.  But The Great Santini sees Bull as someone who is redeemable, and I'll be honest-I didn't see that.  Robert Duvall gives a fully-fledged performance here, particularly given his more limited screentime (he's in less than half the movie, and nearly as much of it as O'Keefe who is a total case of category fraud for me); he makes an unlikable character feel human, and that's not always easy.  But Bull is a jackass, and deliberately cruel to his eldest son.  The film might feel real, but it also doesn't have enough catharsis, and I didn't like that in death we had to have Ben become his father, as if the message was that Bull was right on some level.  That felt wrong to me as a modern audience even if it would've seemed logical to a contemporaneous audience in 1979.

Before I leave the film, though, I wanna mention a few things to get them off my chest.  First, Michael O'Keefe is kind of a blast in some scenes, as he's weirdly kooky in his acting style (Ben isn't a comic book nerd, but O'Keefe plays him as one), and were it not for the category fraud, I'd give him pretty high marks here as I think he finds layers in Ben that the script wants to ignore.  Blythe Danner missed with Oscar, and I'm kind of glad even if this is a favorite role for the Academy (long-suffering wife), as there's not enough there in her part-she plays the role of dutiful spouse a little too well, never really giving us a hint of what her actual feelings are toward Bull (is it sorrow or relief that clouds her scenes after his death...we have no way of knowing).  And lastly, the whole interlude with Toomer feels so tangential (what exactly are we learning about the main father-son dynamic from side characters that bear no meaning on the plot whatsoever?) that it drags down the film in a weird way, as if it's a more TV series with a "very special episode" on a supporting character than it is a two-hour movie.  As a result, I didn't like The Great Santini, but the two central performances are good enough that I can't say that I hated it.

Widows (2018)

Film: Widows (2018)
Stars: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Carrie Coon, Robert Duvall, Liam Neeson
Director: Steve McQueen
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Oh man did I get behind on my reviews.  Theoretically I will be going to the movies in a few hours, but it could well just be one flick as I am so behind on my film reviews, particularly for 2018 pictures, that I could easily spend the next day just writing up here and still not get caught up (I am a Thanksgiving orphan today, but am thankful for all of those near and far that I love, particularly this year).  We're going to start out by reviewing the most recent movie I saw and see how far I can get while working my way backwards, with Widows being a picture that I caught on Tuesday night.  Steve McQueen's latest has had a lot of press in the past few days for a poor marketing campaign that resulted in a disappointing box office performance even though the reviews have been kind, with many wondering whether or not it will miss major Oscar nominations like McQueen's last film (Best Picture victor 12 Years a Slave) as a result.  While I can't get to the Oscar question quite yet, I can definitely add in my two cents on the film, and its misleading advertising campaign.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on the lives of three widows whose husbands, members of Harry Rawlings's (Neeson) mob, recently died.  Harry's widow, Veronica (Davis), is a stoic woman who used to represent the teacher's union, and seems intent to know as little about her husband's dealings as possible, though you get the sense that she knew roughly what was happening and just didn't care.  The two have a seemingly strong marriage, but as the movie progresses, in flashbacks we understand that it was more complicated than that, with their son dying at the hands of a white police officer, and them being increasingly isolated from each other in the years since.  Harry's death resulted in roughly 3 million dollars being burned up, and the two men he stole it from Jamal Manning (Kaluuya), a candidate for alderman, and his sadistic brother Jatemme (Kaluuya), threaten to kill her if they don't get the money.  She recruits two other widows whose husbands died in the same sting that killed Harry named Linda (Rodriguez) and Alice (Debicki), and they plan on finishing Harry's next heist, robbing from the home of Jamal Manning's opponent Jack Mulligan (Farrell), who is looking to succeed his father Tom (Duvall) as City Alderman, with his eyes on one day becoming the Mayor of Chicago.

That's quite the thick plot, and the film, clocking in at 129 minutes, might get its best compliment from me in that it makes total sense and doesn't meander too much as we get to the eventual showdown.  There's little excess here, and McQueen has assembled the sort of ensemble you can only get if your last film won Best Picture.  Seriously-these are some of the best actors working (I haven't even mentioned Carrie Coon, Cynthia Erivo, & Jacki Weaver, all of whom are also on the call sheet), and you don't pull together thespians like this without some terrific work being had.  Debicki has gotten the lion's share of the kudos, and it's partially because this might be her most mainstream effort yet, going toe-to-toe with someone like Viola Davis, but it's probably just because she's sensational.  There's this great scene where she has to play opposite Weaver as her mother, trying to hold back an array of emotions, while the wrong ones keep sputtering out, and I loved the way she seems to be both a vulnerable person and someone who could take on the likes of Davis's Veronica.  Kaluuya gets the showiest part in the cast as Jatemme, a monstrous close-to-cameo role where his huge eyes and deliberate line readings result in genuine fear whenever he's on screen, but Debicki probably is the one who will get the most offers out of this film, and considering I've been cheering her on for years now, that's reason enough to see Widows.

The problem for McQueen's film is that it is marketed as an art house film, but it's frequently too conventional for such things.  That seems to be a problem for box office in recent years (look at something like mother! for another example), but he'd have been better off selling this as a smart action movie, which is what it is.  The further he delves into the marriage of Harry (who, spoiler alert again, is in fact not dead but shacking up with Carrie Coon and their infant son) and Veronica, the less we know about our leading lady.  Davis is a great orator and speech-giver as Veronica, but I'll admit that this felt more like her just showing off than finding a depth in her character.  I had a similar problem with parts of her performance in Fences, with her feeling too theatrical in her delivery, but chalked that up to her having played the part in the Cort Theater and it just came naturally after inhabiting the role for so long.  Widows doesn't have that excuse.  Davis can be mesmerizing, but I left knowing nothing about Veronica, to the point where the ending makes little sense (she sees Alice and smiles...but did she even like Alice?  And why-they hated each other right up until the end of the movie?).  There's stuff on the page that Davis could have taken advantage of, but her marriage feels paint-by-numbers, with her grief only informing certain checks on the film (I loved the way she brought her dog with her everywhere after Jatemme threatened him, not wanting to lose another loved one), but it feels like something was cut or missing on the editing room floor.  Like I said, these actors are too good to be left with a bad movie, which this certainly isn't, but it's also hard not to feel disappointed that considering the talent on-display here (Gillian Flynn wrote it!) that we didn't end up with an indisputable classic.

OVP: Supporting Actor (2014)

OVP: Best Supporting Actor (2014)

The Nominees Were...

Robert Duvall, The Judge

Ethan Hawke, Boyhood

Edward Norton, Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher

JK Simmons, Whiplash

My Thoughts: And now we have come to the acting categories-that top six categories that aren't just "really, XX film won another one?" or "do you want to make more popcorn?" during the ceremony while you're watching at home, but the pins-and-needles, "I wonder if they'll say something political or funny?" types of moments when you're watching the actual Oscars.  Here we have five men, four of whom are arguably most famous for parts in superhero movies, and the fifth of which is an acting legend who with this nod got a staggering seventh nomination over forty years after his first.  I really don't want to start with him as I love him as a performer and hated this movie, but it's time to eat our vegetables (or in this case, Velveeta and battery acid).

The Judge was the worst film of 2014.  I remember watching the movie just a couple of days before the Oscars as I wanted to be a completist but had avoided it like the plague, but knew it would make it for something with a cast and crew like this.  Duvall was the sole citation for the film, and it's easy to see why the Academy went for it-he's a wonderful actor being given a series of big speeches to bluster through, selling the hell out of each of them with enough bombast to make Brian Dennehy say "whoa, pull back a little."  The performance, though, is not good and runs counter to the quieter moments of The Godfather that made Duvall a great actor in the first place.  The picture is dreadful, but Duvall is unable to sell the moments where he throws away his career and reputation trying to teach his son a lesson.  It doesn't help that the script genuinely doesn't make any sense, but Duvall should have at least brought more dignity to the role.  The nomination seems to have been an acknowledgement from the Academy for an actor they admire (who clearly wanted this nomination something fierce-he campaigned hard for it) in a relatively weak year for this category, but that's not forgivable and it's not like Duvall hadn't already been amply (and justly) rewarded before.

On the opposite end of the spectrum to Duvall is JK Simmons, the only person in this field who was on his very first nomination.  Simmons has long been a character actor that you recognize as being reliable, a nice guy, and virtually everywhere (he was weirdly even in a dream I had Saturday night).  Giving him this moment-in-the-sun, especially with such a loud character as Terence Fletcher, was bound to give him the long attention that he deserved, but while I like the sentiment here (especially in supporting categories it's great to see a longtime character actor finally get some love), the performance is mostly underplayed.  Simmons delivers each yell and scream with a fierceness that has to be admired, and his character occasionally is duplicitous in an interesting way, but it's hard to see the nuance here-his Terence is all surface, rarely anything more.  I've said this before, but while I like the idea of little backstory into this man (villains without a reason for their villainy are always more terrifying), it doesn't seem possible that Andrew is the first student that got the best of his ego considering how easily he does it.  Simmons isn't helped by a script that doesn't quite know what to do with Fletcher until the end of the picture, but I feel like he should have found a soul somewhere in that body, even if it was damaged and hollow.  Plus, there's no denying this is clearly a leading role, which has to lose some points from the get-go (category fraud is still category fraud even if you're not a headliner).

Speaking of headliners, let's move onto former major movie star Ethan Hawke, who seems to now spend his forties alternating between random horror movies and Richard Linklater pictures.  Hawke's work in Boyhood in many ways borrows from his real-life persona, and in a couple of ways from his most iconic role as Jesse in the Before trilogy.  I love the way that his hapless loser never really finds his moment-in the-sun, but as the years go by he still finds happiness in what was initially given to him.  This is one of many wonderful observations made by Richard Linklater (the way this movie mirrors life is truly special), but Hawke's Mason is someone that probably never really realized that his dreams didn't come true in the way he hoped, and only reflects on it late in the night, with a beer in hand.  It's a wonderfully fresh look at the parental figure, perhaps because we get to see his evolution in a way we never really could in any other film.  The naturalism that Hawke brings is something to behold, and it's odd that Patricia Arquette got the lion's share of the plaudits even when they're both doing phenomenal work.

Mark Ruffalo may be the most weirdly inconsistent actor that I genuinely love to watch at the movies.  For every iconic performance that I can't get enough of (You Can Count on Me, Zodiac, The Kids Are All Right), I also find him leveling into scenery-chewing or overusing his mumbly gifts onscreen (In the Cut, Spotlight).  Foxcatcher is a weird place in-between the two, where he somehow finds himself in a bad movie giving a relatively excellent performance.  It would have been so easy for Ruffalo to turn his Dave into a watchful worrier, someone that is the moral compass to his brother's misguided lug, but he doesn't do that (except in that ridiculously over-the-top final scene in the snow, but that's all on the writers), and instead he is forced to show what it's like to succeed, even when you have to do so at the hands of someone he can't stand.  Think of how superb Ruffalo is in that video documentary he's making, where he's being forced to read lines that he doesn't agree with and that are justifying the vile abuse of his brother.  It's one of many scenes in the film that show that he understands not only this character, but what this character, a man past his prime but who knew he was once a star (and knows that others want to shine in that glory), would give to the world.  It's a great, understated performance.

The final piece here is with an actor who has never really understood the meaning of the word "understated," but at least here he finds a film where that rings true.  Edward Norton's work in Birdman is a funny look at his own self (Keaton isn't the only one playing a parody), an actor of intense gifts who attempted, but was never successful in, translating into the same type of movie-stardom enjoyed by Keaton's Riggan in the picture.  Norton's character is hilarious, perhaps the funniest part of a movie that is droll but has a nasty and delicious sense of humor.  I do feel, especially in the first table-read scene but also in a smattering of moments later in the picture, that Norton uses his character's excesses to indulge his own, and the acting could have used more focus, but overall I think this is one of the better works from this actor, of whom I'll admit that I'm not much of a fan despite his critical following.

Other Precursor Contenders: Even by awards season standards, the precursors for this field were boring, as almost everyone went with the same lineup.  The Globes and the SAG Awards went with the exact same nominees and winner as the Oscars, while the BAFTA Awards only substitution was category fraud with Steve Carell going in place of Robert Duvall.  This makes Best Supporting Actor one of the hardest categories of 2014 to go with a sixth place (we genuinely got no indication of whom it might have been).  My gut says Tom Wilkinson (Selma) or Josh Brolin (Inherent Vice), both former nominees in big films, but I think they were far away-this lineup was clearly the one all awards' voters preferred.

Performances I Would Have Nominated: I am not one of those voters, however.  I definitely would have made room for Ben Schnetzer's wonderful activist in Pride, Adam Driver's sexy-but-troubled brother in This is Where I Leave You, and though I'd have to see it again (it was probably category fraud, but it's been a while since I caught the movie), perhaps Logan Lerman in Fury.  I know he's intensely pretty, but it'd be nice if an ingenue made it in the male categories on occasion instead of just the female.

Oscar’s Choice: I don't even know who was in second place, as JK Simmons won the Oscar in a landslide.

My Choice: Hawke over Ruffalo-aided by both a better movie and more a natural progression, this is a pretty easy decision even though both are quite good.  Following them would be Norton, Simmons, and poor Bobby Duvall way in the back (you've got six more OVP battles left-don't cry too hard for Tom Hagen).

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Do I have company in preferring Ethan Hawke, or is everyone on the Just Keep Simmons train?  Am I the only person who generally finds Edward Norton off-putting?  And who was the sixth place finisher that clearly should have been taken over Duvall (every name I'm throwing out is better than him)?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 2014: Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Documentary Short, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Previously in 2014

Past Best Supporting Actor Contests: 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013