Just a minute with actor Javier Bardem

Spanish actor Javier Bardem has seen his star rise to lofty levels in recent years in Hollywood, and this year he is nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar, which will be given out on February 24.

Many Oscar watchers believe Bardem, 38, is a shoo-in to win for his role as a cold-blooded killer in bleak crime drama “No Country for Old Men,” which was directed by brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, who are also up for the best director Oscar.

Bardem was previously Oscar nominated for best lead actor playing a Cuban poet in 2000’s “Before Night Falls,” directed by Julian Schnabel, who also is nominated for the best director Oscar this year with “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.”

Q: So, who are better directors, the Coens or Julian Schnabel?

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Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem are odds-on favorites to win Academy Awards for playing bad guys without a backstory in ”There Will Be Blood” and ”No Country for Old Men” — and ringing in a new era of movie villainy

”The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted,” D.H. Lawrence once declared. He shoulda been a movie critic.

Mr. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was writing in the 1920s, but let’s face it, he might have just emerged fresh from a visit to today’s multiplex, his fingers still buttery from a double feature of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. And he might have been left shaken, as so many of us have, after encountering two of the hardest, most morally isolated and stoic killer-dillers in contemporary movies — Javier Bardem’s implacable, Beatle-cut annihilator Anton Chigurh and Daniel Day-Lewis’ misanthropic oilman/bowling aficionado Daniel Plainview.

At the conclusion of this year’s Oscars, Day-Lewis may well take home the award for Best Actor, and Bardem a matching statuette for Best Supporting Actor. By any measure, it was an awfully good year for awfully-behaved characters. Whether we’re talking about Johnny Depp’s demon barber in Sweeney Todd, the up-by-his-bootstraps hoodlum Denzel Washington portrayed in American Gangster, Russell Crowe’s sketch-pad-wielding Western baddie in 3:10 to Yuma, or the serial killer in David Fincher’s Zodiac, evil is artful in some of the best recent American movies.

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The Weinstein Co. has picked up North American distribution rights to Woody Allen’s romantic comedy/drama “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, starring Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson.

Patricia Clarkson, Kevin Dunn, Rebecca Hall and Chris Messina also star in the tale of Vicky and Christina (Hall and Johansson), two Americans vacationing in the title’s Spanish city, who become part of a chain of romances involving an artist (Bardem) and his nutty ex-wife (Cruz).

A steamy menage a trois sequence between Bardem, Cruz and Johansson was the talk of the American Film Market when it previewed in Santa Monica in November.

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