A Few Hollywood Characters Break By means of The Quiet Of The 2020 Awards Non-Season – .

A note from the twilight zone: the awards season is now on, except for this year there are essentially no screenings or cocktail parties and no celebrities answering questions. Movie stars complained about the awards season requirements; Today some are missing the attention, as is their films.

Given this dilemma, this week we were grateful for some random revelations from Sacha Baron Cohen, Matthew McConaughey, and even the late Cary Grant. They all help ensure that there will be no long lines and probably no statuettes.

Baron Cohen has the most pressing reason to avoid invisibility as he has two films to promote – a sequel to Borat and The Trial of the Chicago 7. To get the word out he had to bend his basic rule of never speaking in his own voice . During my last stage sessions with him he appeared as Borat or one of his fictional characters, never as Sacha. But Sacha himself is a tower full of surprises and provocative opinions: “If Facebook had existed in the 1930s, Hitler would have made it possible for Hitler to run 30-second ads for his” solution “to the” Jewish problem “,” he told The New York Times.

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Both of his new films convey his thesis that “democracy is in danger”. He is cast as the seditious Abbie Hoffman in Chicago 7; In the new Borat he is disguised as Donald Trump and intrudes into a speech by Mike Pence.

Unlike Baron Cohen, McConaughey’s new memoir offers homemade wisdom about how to deal with the tough things – family struggles, career setbacks, indecisive directors, and the like. The 51-year-old Texas-born actor who titled his book Greenlights often writes about himself in third person as he guides the reader through his films, which range from the Dallas Buyers Club to Magic Mike to Killer Joe. Unlike most stars who tell how they were magically discovered, McConaughey admits that he fought hard for roles, pursued casting directors, and hammered filmmakers for strong stories. Greenlights, he reminds us, do not miraculously descend on actors.

Surprisingly, a similar manic intensity is also the key to the famous life of Cary Grant, “whose immaculately nonchalant facade veiled a personality of almost eternal fear”. This is the analysis of Scott Eyman, a veteran biographer whose new 557-page book about the legendary star is titled Cary Grant, A Brilliant Disguise.

Grant was a working class Briton who was repeatedly kicked out of school and worked anonymously with an acrobatic troupe before reinventing himself as the epitome of patrician charm and savoir faire. Despite his confused personal life – five marriages and rumors of gay affairs – Grant made 73 films and perfected the romantic comedy genre as nimbly as Fred Astaire was dance.

Eyman reminds us that Grant was both obsessively thrifty and notoriously insecure. As a result, the star felt compelled to rearrange his attitude towards LSD – regular encounters that he openly advocated to friends and even reporters his skills latest movie).

The bottom line is that Grant, like so many legendary stars, was more comfortable performing his movie characters than playing them. “I considered him not only the most beautiful man, but also the most beautifully dressed man in the world,” said Edith Head, the revered costume designer. Perversely, Grant preferred working with Ingrid Bergman over any other actress “because they didn’t care about their looks, clothes or anything but their art,” says Eyman (they excelled in Notorious together).

As a prominent biographer, Eyman’s unspoken mission is to leave readers with a warm and hazy feel about his subjects without their weaknesses affecting our feel for their art. We, the audience, will not benefit from knowing that Humphrey Bogart occasionally made an anti-Semitic remark or that William Holden became drunkenly angry with his agents and publicists. Biographers don’t have to reveal the truth about who stars really are because the stars themselves have no idea.

That’s one reason I admire Baron Cohen’s long-term insistence on speaking through his characters. Playing yourself is risky, especially during the dreaded silence of the off-season awards.