Sean Rocha

My sister wins an Oscar

Well, unofficially at least. But more than 18 years after my sister Kali — previously described as the funniest person I know — had a brief but hysterical scene at the end of Meet the Parents (starting at 58 seconds in the video above) as the passive-aggressive flight attendant making Ben Stiller’s already bad day much, much worse, Philadelphia Inquirer writer Gary Thompson had the genius to choose her as his nominee for a new Oscar category: Best Supporting Supporting Actor.

Thompson’s point was that some parts are indelible even if they are too small to qualify for any of the existing Oscar categories. I can attest to that: a few years ago, though not very many, I was waiting for a flight when the four guys next to me — too young, I would have guessed, to see Meet the Parents when it came out in 2000 — acted out that scene for each other. They couldn’t remember the name of the movie, much less the actress who played the flight attendant; then again, they couldn’t remember Robert DeNiro was in the movie either and he has been nominated for many Oscars in the existing categories. But even secondhand, my sister’s scene made them laugh and captured how they felt about our interminable wait at the airport.

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As if to prove the worthiness of Thompson’s suggestion there be an Oscar for Best Supporting Supporting Actor, consider one of his more contemporary nominees: Brian Tyree Henry in If Beale Street Could Talk. The film is by Barry Jenkins based on the James Baldwin novel — I produced a show at Lincoln Center about James Badlwin and recently wrote about a gallery exhibit about him — and while I had mixed feelings about the film, if I were to map my engagement in it the inflection point was Brian Tyree Henry’s few minutes on screen as an old friend newly released from prison. Man, does he suddenly speak a deep, dark, eternal truth about how scared prison makes you! It was so arresting, so unexpected, that I very nearly had to look away from the screen. Indeed, I later read the script for the film to see where this moment came from and, you know, it wasn’t there on the page: the actor brought it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2019 at 6:16 am. It is filed under That is Genius and tagged with film, Kali Rocha, Meet the Parents, Oscars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.