One Last Thing on the Oscars

I'm not the first to point out that, aside from the gender of the underdog boxer, Million Dollar Baby could have appeared word-for-word in Warner Bros. 1934 film line-up. Not that there's anything wrong with a well executed, traditionally-plotted film. But if spoken by lesser actors than Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, a goodly amount of the dialogue in that film would have been laughable. Great actors possess the ability to speak any dialogue, no matter how cheesy, and make it believable (Bogart was brilliant at this). In their gracious acceptance speeches, Eastwood and Freeman showed some class.

Hilary Swank, on the other hand, did not. I found her tribute to Eastwood, as her "Mo Cushla" (or however it's spelled) teeth-grindingly sappy, not to mention the crassness of yelling a shout-out to her publicist over the orchestra. I feel the same speech, delivered by a Staunton or a Bening, would have been at least tolerable. Hilary Swank's body of work is choked with mostly forgettable performances in middle-tier films like Insomnia and The Gift, punctuated with Oscar bait; she is easily the worst actress to be twice given Oscars. I realize that comparing her laundry list acceptance speech (almost identical to her Golden Globes speech) and her filmography is perhaps unfair, but watching actors like Kate Winslet or Don Cheadle, who have spent years building a respectable body of work, get overlooked merely because their characters don't die horribly grates on me. Well, that's it, no more about the Oscars now.