Team (josh) Brolin Pick Up Your Oscar Buzz Bonus... You've Earned It!

Is there a newspaper or magazine that hasn't had a "Wow, Josh Brolin sure is good in the four hip films he's been in this year... Oscar good!" If there is, I haven't seen it.

And believe me, I would see it.

Yes, he's good in, say it after me American Gangster, In the Valley of Elah, Planet Terror, and No Country for Old Men... but then I thought he was good in Nightwatch. It's just, for me, with all this Oscar talk, it's beginning to look a lot like awards season!



I mean, how many more times must I hear about his audition for the Coens. Or as USA Weekend put the story,

Josh Brolin desperately wanted to audition for the part of Llewelyn Moss, the fortune-finding hunter at the center of this Coen Brothers' adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy best seller. Unfortunately, Brolin was on location filming "Grindhouse," so he decided to send in an audition tape. The brief scenes were directed by Quentin Tarantino and shot by Robert Rodriguez. The response from the laconic Coen brothers? "They wanted to know who lit it," Brolin says. "They weren't interested in me. I was the last person they interviewed. Fortunately, we hit it off."

Or the story about what happened after he nailed the audition, as told by the LA Times...

After failing at first to land the role the Coen brothers term "the action center of the film" -- and with the help of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, who shot Brolin's audition tape on a million-dollar Genesis camera while working on "Grindhouse" -- Brolin made it to the final round of auditions and iced the part of Llewelyn Moss (who, yes, sports a walrus-like 'stache that would make Tom Selleck envious). Two days later, he was happily riding his motorcycle in Hollywood when he slammed into a car and snapped his collarbone.

"I didn't say anything to anybody for a week until my lawyer said I had to, that I was liable," Brolin recalled. "I was under the impression that you grit through it and if nobody knows, that's better. So I told Ethan [Coen] I had a hairline fracture. But it was a clean, absolute break. I'm asking the doctors if I should have an operation. But there was the risk of an infection and no movie. It's the Coen brothers! I'm trying to decide all this on four grams of morphine."

Less than three weeks later, he was on set in Marfa, Texas, and soldiering through his scenes, the physical pain lending his character -- who gets shot, attacked by pit bulls and falls off a cliff -- a world-weary gravitas. "It worked for me," he said, "in a funny, bizarre way that can only happen on a Coen brothers film."

You know the big Oscar push is on when you start seeing the same two or three articles (featuring the same couple of stories) over and over again in the entertainment news media.