Mark Eydelshteyn’s Biggest Awards Obstacle (is not the spelling of his name)

Note: Spoilers ahead for Anora and Fish Tank.

Because of the L.A. wildfires – please help if you can – the announcement of the Academy Award nominees has been pushed back to this Thursday. We are likely to see an impressive haul for films like The Brutalist, Conclave, Wicked: Part 1, and (ugh, god help me) Emilia Pérez within the next few days. And also for Anora, the Palme d’Or and Joey Award-winning film that I finally saw for myself and thought was… really good! I wish Sean Baker stopped assuming “people yelling over each other for extended periods of time” = “hilarious,” and for that reason I am adamant that a far superior 120-minute version of this movie is possible, but the decision to reverse what he did in The Florida Project and Red Rocket and frontload the fantasy sequences before concluding on harsher working-class realism was executed very poignantly in my eyes, and I too thought Mikey Madison was super-lovely as the titular exotic dancer who is sharp and hyper-aware of everything in her life except the spoiled little Russian oligarch manbaby she’s fallen in love infatuation with. She is, deservedly, a sure shot for a nomination for Best Lead Actress on nomination morning, and honestly, I would have no qualms with her ultimately winning it outright. Heck, depending on how much the Academy loves Anora, we might even see Nice Guy Henchman Yura Borisov among the Best Supporting Actor nominees.

Someone from the film who, unfortunately, isn’t a sure bet for recognition is Mark Eydelshteyn. Or is it Eidelstein? Which spelling of his name should voters refer to if they wanted to include him on their ballots? I assume there’s a system the Academy employs where alternative spellings or misspellings of someone’s name are counted as the same person. Otherwise, that would be a really unfair way someone got shut out of recognition. I mean, I’m sure there were plenty of voters for the 92^nd Academy Awards who spelled it “Bong Joon-ho” and “Bong Joon Ho,” so they probably have some kind of guardrail.

Anyway, that’s not the reason why the “Russian Timothée Chalamet” is a longshot, at best, for a nomination later this week. Nor can we chalk it up to “category confusion” even though he’s actually in less of the movie than Best Supporting Actor contender Borisov so it sorta seems like that one fact would settle the “lead or supporting?” debate right then and there.

Anyway, none of these are The Obstacle he’s facing in his path for recognition. The thing that likely spelled doom for his awards prospects before the first pens touched the ballots of the voters is that his character, Vanya, is a smarmy, selfish, impulsive little douchebag who breaks our endearing protagonist’s heart in the end. And the Academy doesn’t like to recognize douchebags. To be clear, they are more than willing to award portrayals of Pure Evil: just ask Daniel-Day Lewis, Heath Ledger, Christoph Waltz, Forest Whitaker, Javier Bardem, and Denzel Washington. Performances of a character’s cruelty that evoke feelings of fear and revulsion from an audience are, in fact, quite popular magnets for awards.

But think about the last great performance you saw that simply made you think “Wow, what an asshole.” Someone like, say, Simon Rex as the fast-talking huckster who grooms an impressionable teenage girl into becoming an adult entertainer in a cynical bid to revive his own ailing porn career in Red Rocket. He wasn’t a Terrifying Embodiment Of Wickedness, he was just a conniving piece of trash. Michael Fassbender’s first Academy Award nomination was for playing a demonic plantation owner in 12 Years a Slave, but it should have been for his portrayal of a charming sleazeball who cheats on his wife and sleeps with his secret girlfriend’s teenage daughter in Fish Tank. The Academy just wasn’t quite as willing to go there with a dirtbag boyfriend as they were with a tyrannical owner of human beings. Were you surprised when Adam Sandler was “snubbed” for his performance in Uncut Gems? Not me, because Howard Ratner wasn’t a monster; he was a weasel.

Personally, when I think of brilliant portrayals of mundane douchebaggery, my mind first goes to Jeff Daniels as the personification of nails-on-a-chalkboard in The Squid and the Whale. Was Bernard Berkman a bigot with the power to orchestrate a murderous conspiracy like Bill Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon? No. Was he a miserly scoundrel whose greed traumatized his own family in a life-or-death situation like J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World? Not really. Was he a frighteningly rage-filled alcoholic like Glen Whitehouse in Affliction? Also no.

But he was a condescending, narcissistic jerk whose myopic obsession with “getting back at” his soon-to-be-ex-wife and giving his son the absolute worst advice imaginable to a young man that age solely to live vicariously through him as a diversion from his own life’s disappointments is somehow much more… aggravating to watch than a clown-themed terrorist trying to blow up two transport ferries to prove that everyone drops their moral principles when pushed hard enough. Probably because we’ve all personally experienced Berkman’s transgressions more than The Joker’s. Most of us have been talked down to by a patronizing has-been who wants to make you feel small to puff himself up. More of us know what it is like to be led astray by a relative thinking more about their own personal bugbears than your well-being. So when we see Daniels so perfectly recreate such a cad on screen, it feels like a petty old wound has been reopened.

Which is why I think Eydelshteyn deserves more accolades than he’s received for reopening the formerly-mended hearts of straight women (and, let’s be fair here, a not-insignificant number of gay men) who saw in Vanya their own younger selves becoming enamored with someone who, quite literally, charmed the pants off of them before being callously discarded like a used toy after a child is bored playing with it. He gets under our skin for the same reason Simon Rex did in Red Rocket: by making us cringe rather than gasp. By not making his moral turpitude seem extraordinary. He is never less than utterly believable in threading together his initial conveyance of adorkable schoolboy-with-a-crush in the first act to a seductive twink in convincing Ani to elope with him practically on a whim and maintaining that illusion until Mommy and Daddy find out to revealing his true self in the end. Bonus points for drunk acting that is more believable than quite a few Oscar-nominated performances of drunks in the past.

He is likely to, unfortunately, be a victim of his own success. When voters see him, they see Vanya. And they hate Vanya. But not me. I see someone who had, arguably, the trickiest role in the movie, and nailed it. You did not escape my recognition, Mark.

For whatever that’s worth.