Watch It: Prelude to a Win
By Emiliano Garcia-Sarnoff
Published: March 19, 2008
Before they brought home gold.
THE COEN BROTHERS
The Coen brothers struck Oscar gold in 2008 with No Country For Old Men, which won Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Directing and was nominated for Best Editing. And though they’d won for 1996’s Fargo, they deserved Oscars long before that. Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?: It’s difficult to dispute that the brothers are among the finest, most original American filmmakers working today. Their films are always set within a fascinating fulcrum of the space/time continuum and are full of fast-talking smooth operators and bumbling idiots.
DANIEL DAY-LEWIS
Daniel Day-Lewis not only won the Best Actor Oscar for his thundering portrayal of oilman Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, he dominated the category. Day-Lewis took up a similar accent and tone in 2002’s Gangs of New York, a film that, despite being somewhat overrated, is worth a watch for his performance alone. But it’s Day-Lewis’ true-story collaborations with director Jim Sheridan that constitute his must-see work: In The Name Of the Father and My Left Foot. In The Name of the Father is an incredible and highly relevant film that centers on the harrowing experiences of Gerry Conlon, a small-time crook whose coerced confession to an IRA bombing lands him in prison for 15 years. In My Left Foot, Day-Lewis’ portrays Christy Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy and learned to paint with his only functioning appendage, his left foot; it is one of the greatest performances in cinematic history.
JAVIER BARDEM
Javier Bardem won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar this year for his knock-out job as the psychopath who haunted No Country For Old Men. Before his acceptance speech, many Americans had a hard time picking him out of a crowd. Yet the Spanish actor has been in some outstanding films. In 2000 he starred in Before Night Falls, a telling of the life and times of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990). In 2004’s The Sea Inside, he played the quadriplegic Spaniard who struggled for 30 years for the right to end his own life as he wished.
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