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Bret is temporarily suspending all movie discussion to rant about Josh Lucas, he has the floor:

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, can someone please explain to me why Josh Lucas is not a movie and/or TV star? Does he have the worst agent in Hollywood? Does he have some sort of rare blood disease preventing him from being a leading man? Was that Stealth movie really so bad that it actually murdered his film career? Is he actually two midgets standing on top of one another? I don’t understand it. I am terribly vexed.

This guy can’t be a movie star, but writers script roles specifically for Taylor Lautner who looks like a llama.

Look at him. Seriously, does he not look like he should be a star? I am not romantically interested in other men, but if I could look like one other human being, it might be Josh Lucas.

He carried Reese Witherspoon to a successful romantic comedy, which is nigh impossible (Sweet Home Alabama); in Poseidon he made a remake that didn’t need to be made watchable and, more importantly, fun; and in A Beautiful Mind he acted opposite Russell Crowe and held his own. I refuse to believe he is incapable.

You want to know his last five movie role character titles?

1. ‘Cab Driver’ in a Nicholas Cage movie called Stolen, which I imagine is every bit as horrible as it sounds. His character name is Cab Driver, for chrissakes! That’s not even a proper noun! Apparently ‘Him’ was just a shade too generic;

2. ‘Neil Cassady’ in a biopic about Jack Kerouac called Big Sur. He co-stars in this movie with Anthony Edwards five years after his career was pronounced dead and Elliott from E.T. who gets cast in one film a year just so he can fill out a W-4;

3. ‘Charles Lindburg’ in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. A role which sounds juicy until you check the credits on IMDB and realize that he received 38th billing;

4. ‘Young Mariner’ in Hide Away. I mean… are they just f*cking with me now? ‘Young Mariner’? Apparently he headlined this movie in 2011. The fact that you’ve never heard of it is not a coincidence; and

5. ‘Ted Minton’ in The Lincoln Lawyer, or as you may remember it, that movie where Matthew McConaughey played a lawyer, but not the one where Samuel L. Jackson hopes people burn in hell.

That’s it. Josh Lucas has been cast in two movies that I have ever heard of in the past six years.

We live in a world where Robert Pattinson is adored (and he makes Keanu Reeves look like Tom Hanks), where Nicholas Cage stars in every third film released, where Ashton Kutcher gets paid $11 billion dollars an episode on TV, yet Josh Lucas can only get work as a character named ‘Cab Driver.’

I am exasperated, but I will not stop until this man gets his due. Josh Lucas, although I imagine you to be a somewhat infrequent visitor at the RockMovieProject, please know that I am in your corner (but, seriously, get a new agent).”

As for the film, the Best Picture winner receives high marks from both Bret and Erin (4.5 Stars and 4 Stars, respectively). Erin cops to nearly crying during the acceptance speech at the end, Bret regards Paul Bettany as being “nearly see-through,” and both proclaim Russell Crowe’s performance as one of the absolute best of his career.