Billy Bob calls Oscars ‘horses—‘
PARK CITY, Utah — Wild prediction: Billy Bob Thornton’s new movie won’t be up for any Oscars this time next year.
Not that the 53-year-old actor and filmmaker — as well as Academy Award winner, for 1996’s Sling Blade — sounds like he’d care. “I keep up with the Oscars about as much as I do the Miss America pageant,” he says. “I think it’s just a dog and pony show. It’s horses—.”
The film in question, The Informers, premiered at Sundance Thursday night. It’s a hedonistic chronicle of sex, drugs and excess circa 1983, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s short story collection. Although it will offend some sensibilities, Thornton offers no apologies.
“A movie or a record or a book, they don’t jump in your shopping cart. They don’t have a brain. You have to buy it. So if somebody has anything bad to say about something, they shouldn’t have gone.”
He’s similarly cynical about the struggle to make character-driven films. One such movie, Peace Like a River, has languished for years despite having Thornton attached as the star and Brad Pitt producing.
“The hardest movie to get financed right now is a character drama,” he says. “It’s come (to the point) where audiences only want to see videogames … They don’t want to see our movies anymore. They want to see us get arrested for DUI on TMZ. It’s kind of sad.”
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