Oscars 2004: If We Picked the Winners (Best Actor)

4. Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby Clint Eastwood plays a gruff man, who grunts more than he speaks. Sounds familiar right? It's not much of a stretch for the veteran actor who made his career more from his steely gaze than his oratory abilities, but before I dive headfirst into a pool of cynicism, I'm going to knock down this straw man argument. Too often people judge someone's acting skills by degree of difficulty, as if acting were like Olympic diving or figure skating. Film, though, is art, not sport, so whether or not any Joe Blow could pull-off a performance is beside the point. What matters is how much the performance contributes to furthering the overall goals of the movie, and this is the criteria a performance should be judged by. This is why, despite his lack of long-winded emotional monologues, Eastwood's no-nonsense, man-of-few-words, tough guy act in films such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are perfect. They serve to make those movies the classics that they are, and Clint deserves a lot of credit for that. By the same token though, if those characteristics serve to weaken the film, then the actor deserves criticism, and sadly, for the most part, that is the situation we have with Eastwood's role as Frankie Dunn in Million Dollar Baby. Playing the owner of a small boxing gym who very reluctantly agrees to train Hillary Swank's Maggie Fitzgerald, his saturnine old-man act only sets up the film to be the stereo-typical melodrama that it is. From the first moments where he resists Maggie's efforts to get him to become her trainer, we can already tell that Frankie secretly has a heart of gold inside, and that this will set him up for a hard emotional fall towards the end of the film. In other words, very early on in the film, the plot becomes an exercise in completion and a total waste of time, as we know exactly where we're going. Now why a heavy amount of the blame for this should go to screenwriter Paul Haggis, Eastwood's performance does not do the film any favors. Had he added something unique to the character, even something really small, it might have thrown the audience off-guard enough to at least suspect that we might not know what the future stored, but alas, we get nothing new. Of course watching Eastwood be Eastwood is always slightly entertaining, but Oscar worthy, I think it is not.