Brendan Gleeson For Your Consideration

It seems like the favorite to take home the Academy Award for Best Actor this year is Gary Oldman for his turn in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I'm a big fan of Oldman's work in general, and his take on George Smiley, the soft-in-the-middle, morose, cerebral, anti-James Bond spy is great. He was fantastic in State of Grace as a low-level, scene-stealing thug, he's been great as Gordon in Nolan's Batman series, and he was just plain wicked in Leon. Oldman's long overdue for an Oscar nomination, let alone an Oscar, and in any other year I'd say, "Yeah, let the chap have it."

But there's just one problem: Brendan Gleeson turned in the performance of his career in The Guard, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh.

(MINOR SPOILERS ALERT)

Gleeson's cop is sardonic, funny, curmudgeonly, brazen, and a bit racist. He returns lost weapons to the IRA rather than impound them. He hires call girls to entertain him on his day off. He wants everyone to think he's just another roob from the country, but this just might be a clever Columbo-like ruse to mask his intelligence. He uses drugs. He manages to stop a shipment of $500,000,000 (street value) worth of cocaine. And, to top it all off, he just might have been an Olympic swimmer.

I don't think The Guard will receive any nominations this year, and that's a shame. Not too many people saw it, and nobody's talking about it right now during the crucial time around awards season. It's a fast, fun movie with intelligent humor and smart dialogue, and the characters are all interesting. Don Cheadle's FBI agent is a little underwritten, but that's okay because it's really Gleeson's show here.

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John Michael McDonagh is the brother of Martin McDonagh, who wrote and directed another awesome crime film, In Bruges. The Brothers McDonagh have a great ear for dialogue and create cliche-challenging characters, but they don't rely on these devices as crutches when telling a story. They both care just as much about plot, resulting in lean, but layered, stories.

The Academy Snubs Yet Another Great Hitman Movie

In 2005, the Academy overlooked The Matador, a fantastic little quirky film starring Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear. Written and directed by Richard Shepard, it was easily the one of the most original stories I've seen in a long time. Never once did the plot take a predictable turn. Shepard managed to balance oddball humor with depth, and the ending is surprisingly poignant. The film also marks Brosnan's most inspired performance to date: a bisexual(?), aging hitman suffering from panic attacks who befriends a businessman in Mexico on a sales trip. Alternatively frightening, pathetic, sleazy, and lovable, Brosnan's creation is something entirely unique, entirely new. Kinnear plays off him extremely well, the everyman to Brosnan's one-of-a-kind. I didn't hold out much hope for this movie but thought it deserved at least a nomination for Best Original Screenplay. No dice.

In 2008, the Academy did themselves one better (or worse?) by nominating, but not awarding, In Bruges, a film written and directed by Martin McDonagh and starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes, for Best Original Screenplay. Laced with dark humor, a lot of style, and some fine performances--Fiennes absolutely steals the show--In Bruges tells the story of Ray and Ken, two heavies working for an English mobster who have to hide out "in Bruges" indefinitely after a botched hit. There's no shortage of laughs in the film, and like The Matador, the plot never quite goes where you think it will. There's a lot going on in this story, and many have posited that Bruges is purgatory for all these characters, while they or the fates or God determines how they are to be punished and if they are to be saved. In Bruges certainly deserved the one nomination it received, though it was probably deserving of a few more. But alas, it was not meant to be.

When will the Academy not be afraid to honor a hitman movie with an Oscar?