5. Chazz Palminteri in Bullets Over Broadway
As obvious as it seems to be to everyone but Woody Allen that he is a card-caring member of the intelligentsia, he just can't seem to embrace this fact. In order to show his affinity for the "every man", he occasionally chooses to show the working schlub as the true "genius". For Bullets Over Broadway, Allen's idiot savant of choice is Chazz Palminteri. Chazz Palminteri plays the role of Cheech, a no-nonsense tough guy, who despite his unquestioning personality, still retains deep insight into the human condition. Cheech, the hired muscle of a mafia Don, secretly writes a play for the playwright David Shayne (John Cusak), an intellectual who couldnt write a sincerely meaningful play if his life depended on it. For Cheech, it doesn't take mental gymnastics to understand the world, and this is supposedly what makes his writing so strong. Putting aside the "reality" question if such a person could really exist, Chazz Palminteri does a good job of making us believe he could. Playing the role without a lot a fuss is the key to making us blindly except the existence of a Cheech in the world. My one major line of criticism about the performance (and the thing that made me rank Palminteri last among the nominees) is that Palminteri slightly overplays the "Joe Six-Pack" angle. This is undoubtedly because Allen places this world in a stylized existence that never really was, but the problem is Allen still attempts to make a statement about the world as it actually is, which turns the reliance on stereotypes into a weakness. Even with this complaint though, it is still a great performance that is worthy of nomination.