WILL THE OSCAR GO TO CRUZ OR O’TOOLE

Penelope Cruz and Peter O’Toole are nominated for leading role Oscars.

Penelope Cruz and Peter O’Toole are nominated for Oscars for their leading role performances in Venus and Volver. Penelope Cruz plays the mother of a teenage daughter dealing with the ghost of her recently deceased mother in Volver.

She talked with villagers in director Pedro Almodovar’s hometown of La Mancha, Spain who swear they’ve seen an apparition, but she’s not quite sure.

“No I’ve never seen one but we met a lot of people in this village and we were talking about ghosts with them because our mother in the movie comes back as a ghost. I believe some of their stories. I haven’t seen one myself. For me at that point I believe that it’s just a body that went away. That instrument to communicate to these dimensions went away but I’ve always had the feeling that things keep going, their trip keeps going but it’s such a personal thing and always a little bit strange to talk about this subject.”

O’Toole in the twilight of his esteemed career portrays an aging actor who begins an unlikely friendship with his best friend’s much younger great niece in Venus.

“For a septuagenarian to find a part like this and a daring piece of filmmaking and a daring script yet I’d say it’s about a dirty old man and a sluttish young woman; that’s what it’s about. Whether the woman and the man would agree to that assessment I don’t know. The arbitrary whims and urges of our sexuality is beyond anyone’s reckoning. The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of. And whether he’s an old guy, a young woman or whatever unimportant, unimportant and resolved in the most extraordinary way.”

This is the eighth Oscar nomination for Peter O’Toole who has yet to win an Academy Award. He was first nominated for Lawrence of Arabia back in 1962 and 20 years later for My Favorite Year in 1982. In 2003 O’Toole received an Honorary Oscar which he initially refused to accept saying he wanted to win the lovely bugger outright.