Recount!

I rented the DVD No Country For Old Men the other day -- I'm getting to where I only want to watch really violent movies on my nice small TV screen, and some of them I'd rather not watch at all. No Country earned four Oscars, including best director, best picture and best adapted screenplay. All of them well-earned; the Coen brothers have a rare gift for directing as well as they write, and they writes some goodness.

I can't say the same for Javier Bardem's win for best supporting actor, though. He walks around stone-faced and stupid-haired, flipping coins and shooting people with a gun and a funky oxygen-tank cow-stunner. If this is what it takes to win best supporting actor, then the Academy needs to repossess Haing S. Ngor's 1984 best supporting actor Oscar for The Killing Fields and hand it over to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Or, if they decide that Arnie's actually got the lead role of The Terminator, then they need to ring up F. Murray Abraham and tell him that Salieri loses again, this time to a robot from 2029. Given that Abraham's recently offered the entertainment world the magnum opus Blood Monkey and is about to grace us with something called Shark Swarm, maybe they should do that anyway.

Tommy Lee Jones would have been a better nomination, and his work here is everything that anyone who suffered through In the Valley of Elah wished it might have been in that film. Of course, in No Country he's saying words from Cormac McCarthy by way of Joel and Ethan Coen. In Elah, he's having to make do with the boiled tripe of Paul Haggis. Even Olivier might have stumbled.