Reason to admire christian bale

Top directors don't want to worry about box office of a movie when they are making it because they are busy guaranteeing the quality of the movie. But they have to face the reality of business and a movie that flops at the box office has slim chance of winning any awards. This is one of the reasons why Universally loved actors like Pitt or Dicaprio are cast in such consistency by top directors. Alejandro Innaritu don't want to worry about revenant making money when he is busy trying to make it as good as it can be.

That leaves us actors like Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper etc. These actors are huge stars but their box office draw and track record is very spotty. So directors like scorsese or tarantino don't wanna take risk casting them in a 100 million $ movie that may be a great movie but will be deprived of all its awards potential if the movie flops. So they have to work with less consistent directors.

Actors can control only their performance. But the ideal scenario for an actor to get recognition for his performance is if a director is making a great movie and he decided to cast the actor because he fits a certain role. So its talent + luck. The lesser the luck the more consistent these actors become. Among these actors only christian bale reduces the luck to almost zero. That's because the roles he takes are extremely challenging even on paper. Take first man vs vice. Ryan gosling chose to do the movie because he fit the role of neil armstrong perfectly and his last collaboration with the director was a hit. Nothing wrong with that. But it's clear that He didn't push himself enough to take a more challenging role and instead settled for low hanging fruit. He tried to minimize the risk my taking on a simpler role. But christian bale on the other hand took on this edge of sword role that would easily fail if he didn't bring it. So in the end even though vice was much more controversial than first man..the very fact that christian bale pushed himself above and beyond any thought possible when playing a role of dick cheney earned him awards recognition.

That to me is precisely why bale is more admirable. Even if the movie was not well received during awards I could have guaranteed you that bale would be nominated no matter what. But Ryan gosling was holding his penis in his hands waiting for first man to be a hit and then using that success the studio would have campaigned for the movie during the awards. It is all about taking the control of performance away from directors and putting it in the hands of the actor.

Uhhhh...

winning and nominating are two different things. Nomination comes with passion and winning comes with consensus. There would never be consensus on dick cheney but there would be passion behind christian bale transformation to get him nominated.

Winning takes every element of the movie to click. But nomination needs the actor to go above a beyond. Gosling never had a chance of getting nominating if and when first man tanked. Because his choice was flawed from the get go. The role came too easily to him.

Uh-huh. So you were saying there was ABSOLUTELY NO CHANCE HE'D WIN just because he was playing Cheney, but you simultaneously were "guaranteeing" he would be nominated. Because they hate Cheney so much, but not enough to avoid nominating him.

Okay.

I think you're practicing some comically obvious revisionism, but whatever. I'll let the dissonance of the quotes and the needle-threading you're trying to do to explain them speak for itself.

What I'm more concerned about is the bizarre tendency to superimpose your obsession with box office into the motivations and personalities of actors you know nothing about. The idea that Gosling (who doesn't market the films) was "waiting" for the film to "become a hit" is an absurd criticism that I can't even really parse.

And this:

No, this is not "clear" at all. This is you, speculating, based on basically nothing. The idea that you have any sense of Gosling's mental state is inherently absurd, but it's particularly absurd to think you can characterize him as timid when he once took a role where his character falls in love with a blow-up doll, for crying out loud.

The blow up doll was early on in his career when he is trying to prove himself but now he has no excuse to not wait for difficult roles he could easily have waited for another role but he knew that damien chazelle was on a roll and people would show up to see a space genre movie by director of la la land and he was wrong. But christian bale knew that vice was a hard sell because people hate dick cheney and he knew that his performance is key to whether the movie does well with awards or not and he was right.

Yeah, or maybe he thought an understated role like that was a hard role. To actual actors, what's showy and obvious and what's hard are not the same thing. Or maybe he just likes working with Chazelle and trusts him. Or maybe sometimes you have a good project that just doesn't turn out that well, because it's hard to make great movies.

These are all more sensible, plausible explanations than the completely fabricated amateur psychoanalysis you're engaging in.

i dont even understand your angle...its simple...for example ,nomination needs 100 people to love what an actor has done with a role...but to win, you need 900 people who didn't love your performance to vote for you...in that case they look for the virtues in the character or questions themselves , what a win for that role means in terms of the value of their vote. They certainly wouldn't want to vote for a movie which is highly critical of a divisive political figure and they can rationalize themselves into thinking that the movie may not be true at all.

My angle is that it's not really believable that you thought there was NO chance of a win but a GUARANTEED nomination, and in fact, you don't express anything like this in the thread I was quoting, even though you replied many times. I even noted the nominations at the time as being dissonant with what you said, and you didn't push back.

So, my conclusion is that you had a kneejerk reaction (based in a mistaken belief that you have some kind of deep insight into the psyches of people you don't know at all), it proved to be wrong, and now you're rewriting history to flip it.

Huh? This is, like, the exact opposite of how people think. And even if it were not, you're just passing speculation off as common sense or established fact, again.