There are many heralded best supporting actor roles in 2005, but how about considering an unheralded one?For my money, one of the most startling performances (in a lousy picture) was Mr. Craig Bierko - who? - see below - playing the mood-swinger with the matinee-idol-looks psycho pugilist Max Baer in Cinderella Man - no one has ever made dating two leggy blondes during the Depression seem more malevolently rich than Caligula at play in his Senate, and no man has ever knit such brows. I was compelled to watch this on the flight back to London from Montreal - that winter paradise - and enjoyed it even with the sound off - because Bierko is that good.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0081572/
An even stranger possible Academy Award Nomination - and so left-field I wish to signal its worth in advance - is quirky thespian Ed Norton as slim noble and strange King of Jerusalem in the globally-derided The Kingdom of Heaven - Norton, who plays the role of the leper from behind a golden mask - sounds like 50s-era Brando, and yet manages to move like some masked orgiastic wretch in the traume that was S. Kubrick's Cruise-Kidman dream-bomb - Eyes Wide Shut (my favorite bad movie).
Oh - and happy new year to each and everyone of you.
