Virgin Territory

Hey, hey, hey, hey, mutha fucka!
With the Academy Award nominations about a week away from being announced, I can already predict what this year will be like.
Movies like Munich, Walk the Line, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Capote, and even The New World will probably be familiar titles nominated. It wasn't a good year for movies, both commercially and critically, so you don't got to be a Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Periot to use deductive reasoning to determine that this might be one of the most boring years for the Academy Awards.
After watching The 40-Year-Old Virgin again this weekend, I've decided that you got to give props to a comedy that doesn't use a fart or shit joke, even though there are vomit and piss jokes. Oh, and dick and tit jokes. Jokes about pussy, bestiality, masturbation, and pot smokers to say the least are sprinled throughout the movie.
Yet, there is something strange about Virgin that I couldn't put my finger on the first time I saw it. Even though it is a comedy, there is something real about it. Most comedies often seemed to have a huge suspension of disbelief on them. Unlike Judd Apatow's previous work, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The 40-Year-Old Virgin actually gives us characters we like rather than one-dimensional caricatures.
It would be a bold movie for the Academy to nominate the movie for Best Picture and Apatow for Best Director, but then again, they have nominated Airport and The Towering Inferno. If Forrest Gump could win, the door is wide open.
Steve Carrell might not be a Brando or De Niro, but there is definitely some method acting to the chest hair waxing scene. There has been a rumor that Jack Nicholson actually let Roman Polanski cut his nose on Chinatown. Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken used a live round in the Russian roulette scenes in The Deer Hunter. Also, it's a hard job to make people laugh, intentionally. So, why not a Best Actor nomination.
She will probably get a nomination for her role as Harper Lee in Capote, but Catherine Keener's performance as the "hot grandma" Trish helps keep the movie from going in the directon of Porky's. Her character is just as hung up as Carrell's Andy and the two make a perfect match. The scenes between Carrell and Keener pull us back to reality.
The supporting cast is great as well. Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, Romany Malco, and Gerry Bednob are casted as Andy's co-workers who really want to help him get laid, but are too stupid to do it the right way. Even better, a lot of people can draw comparision between their friends. Rudd's scene with the porno tapes, Rogen's advice about being David Caruso from Jade, Malco's scenes with the hostile black customer, and any of Bednob's scene would make great clips to be shown on Oscar night.
Now, for the dark horse candidate would go to Michael McDonald. Now, the Doobie Brothers keyboardist never actually appears in the movie except for constantly being shown on a TV making things miserable for Rudd's character. Surely, the man must have had a sense of humor about his own status in the adult contemporary/easy listening scene.
Both Apatow and Carrell have composed a script that walks the line between being clever and being stupid.
While Virgin seems to get its due on the dreaded MTV Movie Awards, which has hailed Napoleon Dynamite as the greatest film of he year, it's about time the Academy Awards gave comedy what it deserves.
Wouldn't it be fun to see host Jon Stewart mess with Carrell at the Oscar show?