Foxcatcher has already had an interesting history with the awards season and it hasn't even been widely released yet. Originally slated to be a contender in last year's movie awards extravaganza, the film blinked and backed out at the last minute when it saw the stiff competition it was up against. Revealing itself in 2014 at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, Foxcatcher won the film's director, Bennett Miller, the festival's Best Director prize. Despite the film's warm reception on the southern beaches of France, since its festival debut the film's Oscar prospects have cooled a bit. While critics have highly praised the very austere character study about the mentally unstable du Pont heir's attempt to start a compound for the U.S. Olympic Wrestling Team, Academy audiences have purportedly found the film too stilted and sterile for their taste. However, one thing that even the film's detractors can agree on is that Foxcatcher is led by three terrific performances from Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo, and the Oscar prospects of all three are still very much alive. Ruffalo's performance in the film is that of David Schultz, the older and wiser of the two Schultz brothers. David tries to act as the mentor of his younger brother Mark (Channing Tatum) much to Mark's chagrin, who tragically turns to John du Pont (Steve Carell) in an attempt to step out of his older brother's shadow. Ruffalo's performance is the most subdued of the three actors, but it is actually the film's best. Ruffalo also gets the film's best scene when he is "forced" on video to praise the leadership skills of John du Pont, a scene that is more tortuous to watch than anything out of Zero Dark Thirty. Mark Ruffalo has given consistently good performances for quite some years now, but has only managed to be nominated by the Academy once for his role in the dramedy The Kids Are All Right. He should find himself with his second nomination this year, although if Foxcatcher turns out to be too chilly for Academy types, he may be on the outside looking in yet again.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
