Alan Smithee: On real-people Oscars and weird thrillers

Your Smithee Highness: Love reading your columns each week. I'm noticing that a lot of acting Oscars and nominations in recent years have gone to performers playing the role of an actual person.

Some I truly believe to be great acting performances (Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote), but others I wonder if they're only a really good imitation (Cate Blanchett as Kate Hepburn and Will Smith as Ali). Your thoughts?

MICHAEL TUCKER, LAWRENCEVILLE, GA.

Your Steady Lowness: I have no idea how any thinking individual could place a descriptive word like "good" anywhere near Cate Blanchett's forgettable misstep in "The Aviator." She probably won the Oscar because voters felt sorry for her.

In the past 10 Oscar shows, 15 performers have won for portraying real-life people -- from Marion Cotillard ("La Vie En Rose") to Judi Dench ("Shakespeare in Love") with actors such as Reese Witherspoon ("Walk the Line") and Helen Mirren ("The Queen") in between.

In truth, the Academy Awards have pretty much always loved the biopic performance. Think George Arliss ("Disraeli"), Charles Laughton ("The Private Life of Henry VIII"), Paul Muni ("The Story of Louis Pasteur"), Gary Cooper ("Sergeant York"), James Cagney ("Yankee Doodle Dandy"), Joanne Woodward ("The Three Faces of Eve"), Susan Hayward ("I Want to Live!"), Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke ("The Miracle Worker") and Barbra Streisand ("Funny Girl").

There are Oscar voters (I know this because I've talked with them about it) who refuse to cast a ballot for anyone playing a well-known real-life individual. They believe it much harder to create a character from the page.

By the way, the greatest performance in that movie came from the aforementioned Foxx, who gave an astounding, yet un-Oscar nominated, performance as the real-life Drew "Bundini" Brown.

After seeing that movie, I fondly remember going up to Foxx in a crowded hotel hallway and quietly telling him in his right ear that all he needed was the right lead role and he would become one of the biggest actors in Hollywood. That was two years and 10 months before "Ray" debuted in theaters. Oh, how I do enjoy being right.

ALAN

P.S. You get a "Kite Runner" kite and an "Ask Alan Smithee" T-shirt.

Dear Mr. Smithee: My favorite kind of movies are thrillers that fall into the category of "weird," such as "Mulholland Dr.," "Blue Velvet" and "Donnie Darko." What are your favorite movies of this genre?

Dear Weird and Proud of It: I think we could party. Those are three really good movies and certainly rank among my favorites, though I'm not quite sure what makes "Donnie Darko" a thriller. Jed, I suggest you brace yourself and get your hands on a few of these:

Lars von Triers' "The Element of Crime," "Epidemic" and, especially, "The Kingdom" movies, Christoffer Boe's "Reconstruction," Gaspar Noe's "Irreversible," David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringer," Takashi Miike's "Audition" and Park Chan-wook's "Oldboy."

ALAN

P.S. You get a "City of Men" DVD and an "Ask Alan Smithee" T-shirt.

No movie for some readers: The wailing about Oscar's best picture winner, "No Country for Old Men," has not stopped. Readers such as Eddie Cook of Norcross, Ga., and Paul Neal of Atlanta are still writing to question my relentless appreciation for the film.

Sorry, no.