USA TODAY International Edition
Bruce Dern keeping his eye on the prizes
After winning best actor at Cannes for ‘ Nebraska,’ he’d love to add an Oscar
You know it’s Oscar time in Hollywood when a hunger to win wafts off glad- handing actors like a sticky drugstore musk.
And yet, everyone sticks to the same script: No, they’re not even thinking about it, and anyway, it’s just an honor to be in contention.
Not so with Bruce Dern. He’s one of this year’s favorites heading into awards season for a career- making performance in director Alexander Payne’s intimate, funny, sad fatherson drama Nebraska ( out Friday).
“I hear a lot of wonderful things. It’s a process that goes on. It’s wonderful if you’re included. I would love to be,” says Dern, who has been nominated for an Academy Award once before, for supporting actor in 1978’ s Coming Home. “It was very, very nice. Overall, the honesty of it all is, there are not five people who are better than anyone else. I knew George C. Scott fairly well, and his point was, acting is not a competition. I’m not fond of that.”
And please don’t get Dern, who has sat through Nebraska two dozen times, started on the faux- humble actors who claim they can’t watch themselves on- screen and don’t see their own movies.
“They’re lying pieces of ( dirt). They’re saying that because they’re either embarrassed about it or it didn’t turn out like they wanted,” he says.
“Keep talking. It’s the best thing of all time,” says co- star Will Forte, 43, sitting across from Dern over dinner.
At the ripe age of 77, Dern is getting some of the best notices of his lengthy and varied career for playing Woody, a disgruntled, delusional drunk in Nebraska. Desperate to claim a $ 1 million prize he’s convinced really belongs to him, he goes on a road trip with his appeasing, amiable but perplexed son ( Forte). Putting himself in Payne’s hands for a seven- week shoot paid off; Dern won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival.
As for the talk of an Oscar nomination, “Bruce is paying attention to it a lot, and the studio is. I would be thrilled for him if that happens,” Payne says. “It means a lot to him at this point, in his third act. But if it doesn’t happen, that’s how the old cookie crumbles.”
Chances are, even if it doesn’t come to pass, things won’t change much with Dern. “I called him up to tell him congratulations ( after Cannes), and he was about to go for a run,” Forte says. “He had just heard the news. At this moment, he picks up the phone, ‘ Hey, what’s up bud?’
“I cannot tell you what that guy means to me. We got to be very, very close, and that is every bit as special as this movie. We’re family now. We talk on the phone. He’ll always pick up the phone.”