The 85th Annual Academy Awards were held recently and it was a decent show. Seth Macfarlane hosted and did a decent job. Some great actors won some big awards. Some more deservedly than others. The majority of awards were handed out correctly in this bloggers opinion. “Argo” won best picture, Daniel-Day Lewis won best actor and Jennifer Lawrence won best actress. All of them were deserving of the praise heaped upon them. Even the intolerable Anne Hathaway was deserving of her best supporting actress award.
There was however one major award they got wrong. Best Supporting Actor. Now don't get me wrong, Christoph Waltz was mesmerizing in “Django Unchained”. It was a truly brilliant performance. The way the man speaks the Tarantino language is a thing of beauty. He was everything you would want in a movie character. He was the sort of “evil, good guy” character. A bounty hunter with little to no conscience, but yet clearly the good guy of the movie. He makes Tarantino dialogue sound downright Shakespearean. When I left the theater after seeing “Django”, I thought Waltz was a shoe-in for Supporting Actor. Despite winning the same award for his other Tarantino role in “Inglorious Basterds”, the Academy awarded him again. The Academy never does that. They finally got it right! Or so I thought. Until I saw “Zero Dark Thirty”.
Jason Clark as “Dan” the black site interrogator was very impressive. Kyle Chandler was convincing as the CIA director. “Stannis” from “Game of Thrones” had a few good scenes. Tony Soprano shows up. There were a lot of good acting performances. None were as impressive as the performance submitted by one Mr. Reda Kateb. It was the most impressive, believable and powerful performance of the year. Yet, nobody even mentions the guy.
***WARNING – SPOILERS AHEAD. OTHER THAN BIN LADEN DIES AT THE END*****
Reda Kateb plays Ammar, a terrorist in U.S. Custody being held at a CIA black site. The previously aforementioned “Dan” is there to interrogate him. And by interrogate, I mean torture the shit out of him. Literally. At one point, Ammar is being dangled from the ceiling by his wrists and “Dan” is letting him know that “Partial information will be treated as no information”. “Dan” lets him know that he is going to have to hurt him. As he picks up the dangling terrorist off the ground, he pulls down his knickers and reveals he has doodied in his pants. “Dan” then humiliates him further by pointing out, as if shocked, that the Al Quada man has pooped himself.
This guy ruins terrorist pants
And boy oh boy do they go for authenticity in this movie. When people are shot, it doesn't feel very Hollywood. People don't go flying or die dramatic deaths. They get shot and they're dead and thats it. It's not like shootings in “Django” where gallons and gallons of blood come spurting out of one bullet hole. It's very cold and it seemed incredibly real. So it should come as no surprise that it was a very realistic pants shitting scene. Kateb really sold it. When his pants come down and his terrorist butt cheeks appear, you can see the shit smeared across them. I mean, it was so real you could practically smell it. They went for such authenticity that you could see pieces of corn and everything. It was horrifying.
It makes you wonder if the guy is a method actor and perhaps actually shit himself. Did he go for it? Or did he have to stand up straight for a few hours in a make-up room while an artist craftfully painted the authentic appearance of real shit smear on his ass. Either way, this man had to stand in front of a camera with other actors and crew watching and show off his poop streaked derriere for all the world to see. That takes dedication. Robert Downey Jr. is one hell of a method actor and has probably shit his pants on multiple occasions, but I don't recall him having the dedication to show the evidence on camera. (Though one could argue he clearly had a dump in his pants throughout “Due Date”).
I wasn't upset about the torture. I'm all for doing what it takes to get information that could prevent terrorist attacks. I didn't feel bad for “Ammar” or any other tortured terrorist. I felt awful for Reda Kateb though. I mean, how does Katheryn Bigelow approach him about this scene? Does she knock on his trailer door, walk in, sit down and say “Hi Reda, you are doing some great work so far. Now tomorrow is the big pants shitting scene, are you ready?? Will you need a make-up artist or will you just eat at Chipotle tonight?”
Whichever way he chose to go, he made the right call. The final result was a perfectly understated pants shitting. The man is a professional and deserves some credit. Shame on you academy and shame on you Christoph Waltz. When asked how he felt about winning his Best Actor award, Waltz mentioned how unbelievable it was to hear names like Robert DeNiro, Tommy Lee Jones, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Alan Arkin called and then to hear his own name mixed in with those. Waltz should have apologized, chastised the academy and then pulled a Ving Rhames and given the trophy to Reta Kateb.
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