The strongest Best Actor narrative belongs to The Holdovers‘ Paul Giamatti — bringer of a beloved centerpiece performance (Joe and Jane Popcorn have been over the moon for Alexander Payne’s ascerbic holiday film from the get-go) plus Paul’s legendary Sideways performance wasn’t even nominated 19 years ago.
Bradley Cooper’s devotional, emotionally emphatic, technically dazzling performance as Maestro’s Leonard Bernstein is obviously a formidable challenger, but Cooper’s narrative (i.e., he really researched and worked it) doesn’t quite measure up to Giamatti’s.
And forget Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy at this stage — the HE narrative (in terms of recognizable human behavior Murphy’s genius physicist is quirky to the point of being inhuman — he’s playing an alien from the planet Tralfamadore) has settled into the groundwater.
Plus Oppie was a flakey wimp (building an A-bomb to kill tens of thousands of Nazis is okay but not so much a hydrogen bomb, which shouldn’t be built because it’s too big). HE sides with Harry S. Truman (“Don’t let that crybaby back in here”).
Plus no admirer of Oppenheimer believes that Murphy’s Oppie was capable of sexual arousal as aliens don’t enjoy coitus…be honest. There was no believing for a second that Murphy and Florence Pugh actually did the deed.
