Oscars recognize the bad guys, too

The academy has gone bad. The Oscars have made a habit lately of rewarding bad behavior, including that of psychopathic killers such as Anton Chigurh ( Javier Bardem in “No Country for Old Men”) and the Joker ( Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”). For about the first 40 years of the Oscars, acting awards more often went to the Atticus Finches of the world. Few evildoers got the gold ( Fredric March in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is an exception). But with the social upheaval of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Ruth Gordon as the adorable Satan worshiper next door in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) and Marlon Brando as the iconic crime boss in “The Godfather” (1972) ushered in an appreciation for the dark side. Since then, the podium has welcomed gangsters ( Joe Pesci, “GoodFellas,” et al.), serial killers ( Anthony Hopkins, “Silence of the Lambs”) corporate raiders ( Michael Douglas, “Wall Street”) and very, very bad detectives ( Denzel Washington, “Training Day”). This year, among the top acting contenders are a horrifically abusive mother, a murderer of children, a Nazi and a despoiler of young girls.

-Michael Ordoña

MARY JONES ( Mo’Nique), “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”

The mother of the title character is a seething, simmering boil of a human being. Unlike some flashy villains, with their charm or master plans, Mary Jones is disturbing because she’s so ordinary. She feels like people whom most of us have met. Without excusing Mary’s horrific pattern of abuse toward her child, Mo’Nique brought a plainly non-judgmental attitude to the work: “In that last scene, she was right there in your face. And she became human. I think that scared a lot of people because you don’t want to feel sorry for her. You want to say, ‘Go to hell! You monster!’ But when you hear somebody say, ‘Who is going to love me?’ . . . What if I’m ever in that position?”

MR. HARVEY ( Stanley Tucci), “The Lovely Bones”

A serial murderer of girls as young as 6, George Harvey is the beast who lives next door. Deliberate and lethally patient, he builds intricate dollhouses for stores to sell to the young girls he covets. Tucci, so appealing as Julia Child’s husband in this year’s “Julie & Julia,” here bleaches out that warmth into a veneer of studied human-like behavior. Despite the actor’s often cultured, intellectual roles, director Peter Jackson saw darker potential in him: “I guess the one role we were thinking of was the way he played Eichmann in [HBO’s] ‘Conspiracy.’ The way he played the ordinariness of evil; he played one of the most creepy, profoundly cold, calculating killers of all time as an ordinary bureaucrat. And Mr. Harvey blends into the local community because he’s unremarkable.”

SS COL. HANS LANDA (Christoph Waltz), “ Inglourious Basterds”

Speaking of Nazis, the first clue that the brilliant Landa is not in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize: His nickname is “the Jew Hunter.” He does little actual killing; his is the chase, not the rending of the quarry’s flesh. What separates the Sherlock Holmes-like colonel from the pack of swastika-twirling villains is the 100-megawatt intelligence powering both character and performance. Landa is keenly aware of the difference between good and evil but does not allow those value judgments to interfere. As Waltz says, he is “not out to ‘do evil’; the choice is infinitely more sophisticated. The choice is not to employ the question at all. I refrain from calling him a ‘villain’ because that’s an interpretation.”

DAVID (Peter Sarsgaard), “An Education”

David is a boy in a suave, 30ish body. His worldly charm combined with his alarming ability to detach himself from the reality of his circumstances make him the living nightmare of every young girl’s parents. He’s a seducer of at least one dreamy teen, but never meaning harm. So how bad is he? It depends, probably, on one’s experience with this sort of person. “He’s generally a guy who just wants peace,” Sarsgaard says. “He doesn’t even know how to deal with it when people are upset. . . . There’s a real disconnect in the guy, which is what’s dangerous about him. I think it’s a huge problem in the world, and it’s what makes him relevant.”

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