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Paul Giamatti Should Win Best Actor for The Holdovers—and Deserved It For This Comic-Book Movie From 2005, Too

The man has been the cinematic face of quiet desperation for 20 years. Give him a goddamned statue.

Yet where Al Pacino, playing a very similar role in Scent of a Woman, got to make a big speech on behalf of Chris O’Donnell at the end, Giamatti gets fired, driving off into the winter fog with a bottle of whiskey as his copilot. This foreshadows Harvey’s later epiphany; that he, the ultimate “regular guy” leading a life of quiet desperation, should be the “hero” of his friend Robert Crumb’s comic books. And even if they had, and Giamatti had gotten nominated, he would’ve been up against a veritable murderer’s row: Jamie Foxx in Ray(who won), Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda, Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland(kind of a joke now, but he was genuinely great in that), Leo DiCaprio in The Aviator, and Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby.

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