The Bad boy

Steve Pratt talks to the Hollywood actor about getting his hands on “that little gold guy” and speculates about the other winners.

HOLLYWOOD actor Jeff Bridges is contemplating, in his own laidback way, winning an Oscar.

“Well, we’ll see,” he says. But the odds are that, tomorrow, he’ll step up at the Kodak Theatre, in Los Angeles, to accept the best actor statue for his performance as fading, alcoholic country singer Bad Blake, in Crazy Heart.

Four-times nominated and already the winner of every best actor award going for Bad, Bridges taking home gold is a sure bet.

His reputation is for being laid-back – fostered by his spot-on turn as The Dude in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski – but at this moment he’s sitting bolt upright on the edge of an armchair in a London hotel. This is his last interview of a day spent promoting Crazy Heart, which was heading straight to DVD until being picked up by Fox Searchlight and put into cinemas.

“Any kind of awards or recognition is very important for bringing people into the theatre,”

he says.

“For me, it feels great to get the nod from my guys, from the actors who do what I do. The awards themselves… it would be wonderful to have that little gold guy, that cool statue. I’d like that.

“The awards are a great chance for all of the moviemakers to show their wares. There’s a great commercial aspect to the whole thing that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Since earning his first Oscar nod in 1971 – for best supporting actor for The Last Picture Show – Bridges has established himself as one of Hollywood’s more adventurous and, yes, laid-back actors. For all that, he’s a team player, which becomes obvious as he talks about working on Crazy Heart with the likes of Robert Duvall and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

“What made this one particularly satisfying were these great actors I got to play with. The great thing about acting it’s like if you do sports, your game rises if you’ve got a good guy against you. To play with those great actors really allowed me to go to those places.

“Acting is like a magic trip – sleight of hand and real alchemy, pouring different elements and then seeing how your heart responds.”

Gyllenhaal plays a reporter who has an affair with older man Bad. “We thought about having a more age appropriate relationship but somehow the story didn’t lend itself to that,”

he explains.

“I don’t know if age was specified in the book but as far as how that felt – I think of myself as 25, I can’t believe I’m 60 years old.”

On screen, he makes acting drunk look easy but that’s all it was – acting. “I certainly didn’t want to act drunk, I made that mistake early in my career,” he says.

“You think, ‘I’ll just get drunk, it’ll be very natural’. No, you don’t want to do that. I might have an extra drink at the end of the day, get a little hangover, that was kind of appropriate.

One of the good parts of being Bad was being allowed to indulge his love of performing songs written for the film by T Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton.

He may have that laid-back reputation, but you’d be hard pressed to say that he’d been typecast. Choosing diverse roles was a priority after seeing his father, Lloyd Bridges, pigeonholed after starring in the Sixties TV series Sea Hunt, as skindiver Mike Nelson.

“He played it so well and for a good length of time that people thought he was a skindiver and he got offered a lot of skindiving roles. But he was a very versatile actor who did Shakespeare and Man Of La Mancha on Broadway.

“So I decided to navigate a little bit differently and mix it up, just to keep it more interesting for myself and also to send messages out to people who finance the films that I can play different roles.

“Also, as a lover of films myself, I notice if a person has developed a real strong persona it’s hard for me to sometimes imagine him as that character he’s playing in the film. So I like to confuse the audience in a way and not really develop that strong persona.”

■ Crazy Heart (15) is now showing in cinemas.

And the winners might be...

THIS year’s Academy Awards have been billed as The Battle Of The Exs, but it’s more a case of Art vs Money.

The director of Avatar James Cameron, hopes to repeat the multi-Oscar winning feat that saw Titanic take 11 statues, including best picture.

Ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow has already won several directing awards for war drama, The Hurt Locker, and is now vying to become the first woman to win a best director Oscar.

The pair also go head-to-head for best picture, a category made unpredictable by a rule change. Ten movies, instead of the usual five, are nominated with the winner decided by preferential voting, rather than by a straight vote.

No suspense about who’ll take the acting prizes. Jeff Bridges as best actor, for Crazy Heart, and Hollywood’s current darling – and, let us not forget, most successful actress at the box office – Sandra Bullock for real-life sports drama, The Blind Side.

But I fear nominated Brits Colin Firth and Carey Mulligan, who are already Bafta winners, will go home emptyhanded.

■ The 82nd Annual Academy Awards take place tomorrow and are showing on Sky Premiere/HD from 1am.