Every two or three years I’ll re-watch Alexander Payne‘s Sideways, mainly to savor Paul Giamatti‘s exquisite performance as morose Miles, a failed novelist and wine aficionado who falls in love during a week-long hiatus in Santa Barbara wine country.
So I re-watched it again last night, and there’s absolutely no question that Giamatti’s conflicted and deflated fellow wasn’t just the best lead male performance of ’04, but possibly the 21st Century’s finest and certainly one of the most penetrating of the last 70 or 75 years.
In my mind Miles Raymond is right up there with Willy Loman as one of filmdom’s most poignant expressions of middle-aged ennui, only funnier and only flecked with a tragic arc as opposed to being defined by one.
Sideways was appropriately nominated for Best Picture Oscar that year, competing against The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, Finding Neverland and Ray. But Giamatti wasn’t even nominated for Best Actor. He won SAG’s 2004 Best Actor award, but the Best Actor nominees turned out to be Jamie Foxx (Ray — the ultimate victor), Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda), Johnny Depp (Finding Neverland), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Aviator) and Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby).
Due respect to Cheadle and director Terry George, but 17 and 1/2 years later I can’t recall a single scene from Hotel Rwanda. All I can remember is that everyone (myself included) said it was worthy.
Nor can I recall a single vivid scene from Finding Neverland….not one. In The Aviator, DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes struck me as overly strained and actor-ish — he was 15 times better in The Wolf of Wall Street.
The thinking in early ’05 was that Giamatti didn’t “work the room” hard enough. Jamie Foxx charmed the pants off of each and every Academy member he met that season, but Giamatti, like Miles himself, was a bit too sullen and withdrawn.
But what a joke it was and still is that the Academy basically said, “Yes, we recognize that Giamatti gave a great, half-funny and half-sad performance, but we just couldn’t nominate him…don’t ask us why…okay, we didn’t nominate him because we’re too shallow.”