Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Like many a comic actor before her, Melissa McCarthy would like to show she be taken seriously in a serious movie. She’s off to a good start with this one, picking up an Oscar nomination for the true story of Lee Israel, a fiction writer whose career is in the toilet, and who finds out she has a talent for creating forged letters from famous writers. For a while there she’s living pretty well, but if she had gotten away with it she never would have written this book about it, would she? You can’t help but like her (or I can’t, anyway) because who did she really hurt? I can’t get very excited about rich collectors being conned. These assholes pay ridiculous prices for little bits of history that really ought to be in libraries. Fuck ‘em. In fact, fuck all collectors who pay $100,000,000 for splashes of paint on canvas, or Andy Warhol’s lithographs, or any art.

Richard E. Grant was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and he was robbed. It’s not the first time this has happened, due to the Academy’s idiotic definition of “supporting.” The award went to Mehershala Ali. It wasn’t Ali who did the theft. He is a fine actor and he was quite good in Green Book, but supporting? Give me a fucking break. He was on screen just about as much as Viggo Mortenson, who was nominated for … guess what? Best Actor. If Ali was to be on any ballot (and I have no problem with that) it should have been in that category. But that would have split the vote, and Viggo had top billing … Not fair. Not fair at all.