Illustration: Douglas Jones
Best Actor
There are many great actors from New Jersey, from Jack Nicholson to Ray Liotta to Bruce Willis to James Gandolfini to Paul Rudd. But to the vast and influential Ottie Award nominating committee, the two greatest are men of small physical stature but immense screen presence. One is Danny DeVito (born in Neptune Township in 1944), who has improved almost everything he has ever done on both the small screen and the silver screen, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Taxi to Get Shorty to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Ongo Gablogian alone deserves an award. But the winner here is one Joseph Frank Pesci, a year and a half older than DeVito, born in Newark and known for creating some of the most indelible characters in film history, largely in the movies of Martin Scorsese. Take Raging Bull, in which Pesci played Joey LaMotta, little brother to Robert DeNiro’s Jake. Or Goodfellas, where he played Tommy DeVito (no relation), the lifelong best friend of Henry Hill. But Pesci has range. After establishing himself as a master of the urban Mob movie, he branched out into comedy. He was brilliant in My Cousin Vinny, playing an Italian Brooklyn lawyer drawn into an Alabama murder trial. But perhaps his most iconic performance came in the immortal Home Alone movies, in which he starred as Harry, half of the Wet Bandit crew that terrorizes Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin). Forced to submit to physical-comedy gags that seem more suited to Wile E. Coyote, Pesci managed to somehow make Harry sympathetic.
Best Actress
Natalie Portman created one of the archetypal Jersey-girl roles in Garden State. Catherine Keener got dumped on the Turnpike in Being John Malkovich. Meryl Streep was raised in Bernardsville. But for the best performance ever by an actress in a film set in or having to do with New Jersey, you’ll have to home in on a bleak suburban landscape in Essex County and follow the adventures of one Dawn Wiener, a 12-year-old girl who is struggling with family issues, emerging sexuality, and the eternal problems of love, friendship, alienation and the passage of time. Dawn is the main character of Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, from 1995. No, more than that: She was such a beloved character that she reappeared in two more Solondz films, Palindrome (2004) and Wiener-Dog (2016)—which is, not coincidentally, what characters in Welcome to the Dollhouse derisively call Dawn. Dawn was played by Heather Matarazzo, who not only wins the Ottie, but is this category’s runner-up as well for her performance in Our Guys: Outrage at Glen Ridge, a 1999 television movie about the infamous early-’90s sexual assault case.
Best Director
This award must go to a good movie, but also to one whose personality is inseparable from that of the director who made it. The nominating committee considered The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 drama, which starred Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny callback!), for its bleak but wry psychology, though one member felt that it recommended Rourke more than Aronofsky. It considered The Many Saints of Newark, David Chase’s 2021 prequel to The Sopranos, which cemented his understanding of what another voter called “the milieu that made Tony Tony,” though the fact that iconic performers like James Gandolfini and Steven Van Zandt were absent and their characters played by relative unknowns ultimately worked against the film. The winner here is Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s patiently observed portrait of a city bus driver who writes poetry as he goes along his daily route. Starring Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani, with a cameo by Method Man, Paterson is a Zen-like meditation on the ways that daily life can be elevated into something more extraordinary. We are honored to give Jarmusch an Ottie.
Best Picture
Some of the most interesting movies about the state are not the best, but rather, flawed, gritty dramas. There’s Cop Land, a bridge-and-tunnel police-corruption story that served as a late-’90s comeback for Sylvester Stallone after a series of failed comedies. There’s The Hurricane, which stars Denzel Washington as Rubin Carter, a heavyweight boxer who became a cause célèbre after he was wrongfully convicted of a triple murder in a Paterson bar. However, the Ottie can’t go to a flawed but gritty drama. It has to go to a movie that not only started strong, but gained in stature over the years. That narrows it down to three films. One is Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. There was a contingent of voters pulling for it. The runner-up is Atlantic City, Louis Malle’s poignant 1980 casino romance, powered by indelible performances from Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster. And the winner is On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan’s timeless 1954 drama about longshoremen in Hoboken. It stars Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, a boxer who takes a dive and ends up in the pocket of the Mob. Brando turned down the role at first, and Frank Sinatra was briefly considered. On the Waterfront could have been a contender, and was, and remains one. It also has an uncredited cameo by Fred Gwynne (second My Cousin Vinny callback!).
Ben Greenman is the author or coauthor of more than two dozen books and edited Unrequited Infatuations, the best-selling memoir by New Jersey icon Steve Van Zandt.
The world’s first movie studio. The country’s first film hub and drive-in cinema. The coining of the term “cliffhanger.”
New Jersey’s diverse towns are excellent shoot-ready chameleons that easily mimic cityscapes, suburbs and other locales.
