Maxim critic, Hollywood Wiretap columnist and Hollywood get-around guy Pete Hammond has done a podcast chat with The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil about some early Oscar favorites. His, not mine; I agree with only a couple of them.
O’Neil doesn’t specifically allude to Hammond speaking about the inevitability of Tommy Lee Jones as a Best Actor candidate for his Olympian performances in No Country For Old Men and In The Valley of Elah, but apparently Hammond does speak of No Country in the recording.
Hammond also pushes the “magnificent” Don Cheadle for his Talk to Me performance as legendary Washington, D.C. deejay Ralph “Petey” Greene. Trust me — it won’t happen. Cheadle almost always gives exceptional performances, but the character has to embody something that people relate to or believe in, and Greene is shown as a bright firebrand who ended up as a loser and a boozer with addictions that ended his life too soon.
Milos Forman‘s Goya’s Ghosts “is not going to go to the Oscars in anything but a technical category,” Hammond predicts. John Waters‘ Hairspray, however, “delivers…it’s a lot of fun.” No, it isn’t — it’s relentlessly fizzy, repetitive and droning, although I recognize that a lot of people are liking it. (I’ve had problems with Waters skin-deep films all along, so my reaction came as no surprise.) Hammond also calls it “a mid-July sleeper.” Okay, and what does this have to do with Oscar prospects?
Hammond is completely correct is predicting Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose and Julie Christie in Away from Her are almost certain Best Actress nominees, “no matter what comes up the rest of the year.” A Mighty Heart‘s Angelina Jolie “will get a big campaign,” yes, but it’ll be an uphill effort because of the film’s box-office failure.