Oscar faces
The Academy Awards will be presented this Sunday, Feb. 22, on ABC (starts 5 p.m. Pacific). A highlight will be the presentation of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to comedy legend Jerry Lewis, 82
Actors
Sean Penn, 48, earned his fifth best actor nomination for playing the title role in “Milk,” the story of Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist and San Francisco supervisor who was murdered in 1978 by fellow Supervisor Dan White. Penn’s father, the late actor-director Leo Penn, was Jewish. His mother is Catholic. Sean Penn was raised secular and calls himself agnostic. (Josh Brolin, who played Dan White, earned a best supporting actor nomination. Brolin is the stepson of Barbra Streisand.
Writers and composers
Brit Peter Morgan (“Frost/Nixon”) and American Eric Roth (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) compete against each other for the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. “Frost/Nixon” is based on Morgan’s original stage play. Morgan, 45, who is secular, is the son of a German Jewish refugee father and a Polish Catholic mother. Roth, 63, won a 1994 Oscar in this same category for “Forrest Gump.”
Mike Leigh, 65, is among the most respected of British writers and directors. He’s been nominated for an Oscar six times. This year he is up for best original screenplay for “Happy-Go-Lucky,” which he also directed.
Composers Danny Elfman (“Milk”), 55, and James Newton Howard (“Defiance”), 53, vie for the Oscar for best original score. Both began as rock musicians before switching to film composition. This is Elfman’s fourth nomination for best original score; Howard has earned eight such nominations. Howard said in a recent interview that he identifies as Jewish even though his late father’s Jewish origins were unknown to him until he was about 35. He added that working on “Defiance,” a film set during the Holocaust, had special meaning for him. (Note: Thomas Newman is nominated this year for best score and best song for
“WALL-E.” Newman was raised in his mother’s Christian faith, even though his father, the late film composer Alfred Newman, was Jewish.)
Foreign film and documentary
“Waltz With Bashir,” an Israeli animated film about the 1982 Lebanon War, directed and written by Ari Folman, 46, is a heavy favorite to win the best foreign language film Oscar. Folman served in the Israeli army during the conflict.
“Trouble on the Water” is nominated for best feature-length documentary. It tells the tale of a New Orleans couple who were caught up in Hurricane Katrina and how they’ve tried to recover. The co-director/writer/producer is Tia Lessin, 44, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Lessin says, “What we saw on TV were helpless victims or criminal looters. But the people depicted in [my] film were survivors. Because I knew survivors from the Holocaust, I sensed these were not victims, but people trying to rebuild their lives.
Producers and miscellan
The Oscar for best picture goes to the film’s producers. Eric Fellner, 50, is one of the three producers of “Frost/Nixon,” a best-picture nominee. Fellner, a Brit, also produced “Sixty Six,” the story of a British Jewish boy’s bar mitzvah. Fellner told the press that his son happened to be bar mitzvahed just after “Sixty Six,” which recently made it to DVD, was released.
“The Reader,” about a German woman (Kate Winslet), who served as a Nazi death camp guard, earned five Oscar nominations, including best picture. Sydney Pollack, the famed film director who died in 2008, is posthumously nominated as one of the film’s producers. “The Reader” has been savaged by many critics as having a morally dubious take on the Holocaust. Its Oscar nominations are a tribute to the ability of its distributor, Harvey Weinstein, to play all the Hollywood angles and get Oscar nods for his flicks.
Columnist Nate Bloom, an Oaklander, can be reached at [email protected].