Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld." In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee Film, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including the comedy Web site, comicwonder.com. He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com.

The Academy Awards are Sunday, and I want "Slumdog Millionaire" to win everything just because it is a feel good movie with graphic scenes of torture and insane poverty and it ends with a Bollywood style dance number on a train platform.

It's fun, funny, informative and the fact that Danny Boyle can successfully put an American-style love story inside the geography of the most extreme poverty and personal violence I've seen since "City of God," that fact alone means it deserves a couple of nice awards. Today, however, I am just going to talk about the Best Actor Award.

I haven't seen "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." I kept waiting for a disc to come in the mail from the Screen Actors Guild, but I guess everyone is cutting back with the economy the way it is and everything.

I have been told that it is very good. I have lost a lot of interest in what can be done with computer imaging and the other kinds of special effects that are possible these days, so part of what has kept me away is knowing that only part of Brad Pitt is actually responsible for the performance.

The way I feel is related to the way I felt about the fellow who played Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, Andy Serkis. I thought his performance was one of the best I had seen that year or in many years, but because so much of what we actually saw was computer graphics and not the flesh of Andy Serkis, no one paid any attention to him at awards time. No one, that is, except Peter Jackson, who cast him in the first place and knew just how important the living actor was to the performance.

It was Serkis, with electrodes attached to his body, that acted Gollum's part with the other actors. It was Serkis whose voice we hear, who made the word precious into a now celebrated caress with bloody fingers across stone. And it was Serkis that made a man into a monster, and a pitiable one at that.

But now, partially, I believe, because it is Brad Pitt, whom we all know from the line at the grocery store, and partially because enough time has passed and we know a little more about how the computer imaging process works, now it is possible for a computer created performance to be nominated for an Academy Award. The curious thing is that whereas Pitt's well-known face is used throughout the picture, other actors were used to "perform" as his equally well-known body as his character ages in reverse from an old man at birth to an infant at the end.

Mickey Rourke has a very good chance of winning for his "comeback" performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson in "The Wrestler." Hollywood loves a comeback. I am sure that Mickey Rourke "inhabits" the character. But Darren Aronofsky is a brilliant director and built the story around Rourke's own history to the point that it is almost becomes a mockumentary. I am not sure that Rourke's performance should be elevated to the level of say Sean Penn's in "Milk." The only reason I might think about wanting Rourke to win is the off chance that he might bring one of his dog's up on stage with him to accept the award.

Sean Penn's performance is the work of a very gifted professional. I know his politics are anathema to many, but the work he has grown into as an actor and as a director should allow you to forgive him for speaking his mind pretty much the way you probably do, except that you disagree and that more people listen to him.

"Milk" is an important film and I hope it gets celebrated in some category at the awards because it raises an important issue. The public intolerance of a gay life style is not as strident as it was in 1978, when they tried to ban homosexuals from working in public schools, but it is still there. Men and women who either choose or by genetic predisposition prefer the intimate company of people of the same sex are still distrusted and even scorned by mainstream society, and that, in this day and age, is just silly.

I was trying to explain "Frost/Nixon" to a 13-year-old. From her point of view, it is pure fiction. I can explain to her that there once was a man who abused the office of the President of the United States to the point where he had to resign before being impeached and he was subsequently paid a very large sum of money to discuss, or try to avoid discussing, his crimes on television with a man who had previously done primarily comedy, and I've lost her just after the "... abused the office ..." part.

It just doesn't make any sense. Of course, it didn't make much sense when we had to live through it. And then there's the fact that it kind of sandbagged any credibility that the President, indeed politicians in general, may have had. Frank Langella does a beautiful job of bringing out what he and Ron Howard, the director, want us to believe is the soul of the man. It almost becomes an apologia. We see Nixon as just a man, a driven, ambitious, probably damaged, and perhaps unscrupulous man, but a man whom it is now time to forgive. Well, not me. I'm not issuing any apologies for the bombing of Cambodia, ever.

That's a little strident I know, and I don't want to take away from Frank Langella's performance. I didn't see it on stage in New York, but am told that it was extremely powerful. On screen, it is a little stagy, that is it is a little actory, obviously theatrical, and somewhat arch. Consider the source.

I always find Ron Howard's direction to be limited. It is good but not profound, interesting but never surprising, attractive but not startling. He takes good, challenging ideas and makes them accessible, but he doesn't push the ideas themselves, he doesn't challenge us to rethink anything, or even to think at all. There is a paternalistic aspect to his direction, he asks us to trust him to take care of everything, we just have to sit back and take the ride. It's not that I'd rather do it all myself, but I do like to work a little bit for my pleasure.

My favorite performance amongst those nominated in the category of Best Actor is that of Richard Jenkins in the little seen film "The Visitor." I admit to liking it because Jenkins is about my age, he's been in the trenches, working as a journeyman actor in films and television since 1974, playing Cop #1, or the star's girl friend's father, most memorably as the ghost of the father in "Six Feet Under" on HBO.

Now, after 30-some years in the business, he has gotten a part that carries a film and he has done the work and he is being recognized for it. I also think the film is wonderful. It is small and unselfconscious, by that I mean that it doesn't take itself to seriously; it speaks of an issue (the treatment of illegal immigrants) that is easily ignored, and it tells it's story simply, believing that the story, and not the style of the telling, is most important. Jenkins' performance is all those things, too. It is simple and straightforward, well thought out and honestly executed, with passion. I read somewhere that Meryl Streep said about acting that, "We're paid to care." Not about the paycheck or the adoration, but about the stories we tell, and Richard Jenkins is all that.