Oscar nominee Jeff Bridges sat down with ABC News to discuss his nomination as Best Actor for “Crazy Heart.
“It’s great getting the nod,” he admits of the nomination. “You know, getting the “atta boy” from those guys who do what you do. That’s a wonderful thing. And also, it brings attention to this movie that I’m so fond of and we want people to go see, so it helps that kind of thing.” He admits that he doesn’t enjoy the actual ceremony so much, however. “I find it pretty anxiety provoking,” he says. “I get pretty – you know, it’s a pretty good place to work on our angst. You know, forgetting what you’re going to say if you happen to win, wondering if, you know, people’s names you’re forgetting you should know. There’s a lot of tension involved. But that’s all good practice for relaxing.”
He says that as a result of the work involved in both making and publicising “Crazy Heart”, he hasn’t seen all that much of the other nominees’ work. “I’ve been so busy pushing “Crazy Heart”. It might’ve gone straight to DVD, but Fox Searchlight, they became our hero and picked us up and they wanted to put it out right away. So that meant we couldn’t publicise it in a normal way. So we went right to doing all these Q & A’s and working right away. And I haven’t really seen – actually, I saw “Up in the Air” the other night, and loved George’s (Clooney) performance, and that whole movie was wonderful – (and) I saw “Avatar”.”
