Friday 9 July 2010

Best Supporting Actor 1985: Don Ameche in Cocoon

Don Ameche won an Oscar from his only nomination for playing Arthur Selwyn one of the many old people to get a knew lease on life due to Alien help.

Cocoon is a sort of interesting film that has some nice moments to it, its not great, but it is okay.

Don Ameche's win is one of the strangest wins ever I must say. It seems the academy merely decided that they all wanted to give him an Oscar. I do not think he won any single prior awards in fact I do not think he was even nominated for any awards besides it. Maybe they just gave it to him because they knew he was going to make a good speech, which he did. I mean, you know there is a problem with a performance when the clip at the Oscars was that of his stunt double doing a break dance, I guess they could not find any moments of him really acting. 

Now it might seem odd that I have not spoken about his performance really yet but what is there really to say about it. He is not bad, but he does not do anything either. He is always the third banana, he is always just in the background looking as the other actors do a lot more than he does.  He really lacks a portion of the story, all he does is romance one of the elderly women and then marries her. There is nothing special about his scenes involving this though, or anything else that he does. He does what he needs to but that is really little. Almost every other male performer deserved a nomination more than Ameche in this film, basically everyone besides the real bit part players and Steve Guttenberg. This was just a life time achievement award, and his performance really has nothing to it.

1 comment:

Tom said...

Agreed. If anyone were to have gotten a nomination, I would think Wilford Brimley; out of the three main older actors, he played the character who stood out, and the one I remember most. I can't remember what Ameche even did in the film.