Oh and Speaking of Negative Campaigning

Nikki Finke smacks down the NY Times, accuses the paper of being biased against Mickey Rourke:

One of the most time-honored traditions of the Oscars is the redemptive quality of its nominations process. Talent who’ve hit the the skids over the years through their own bad decisions personally and/or professionally can suddenly find their careers revived because of Academy Award attention from their peers. Such is the situation this year with Mickey Rourke and Fox Searchlight’s The Wrestler. Which is why that recent New York Times Magazine profile of him was so unfair. For a newspaper that rarely examines anything Oscar with a cynical eye, this is usually a slam dunk bit of heartwarming PR: actor squanders great promise, gets written off by the Industry, then gives a wonderful performance, and gets the recognition that was long overdue. Instead, the NYT decided to go a different way: investigate every claim that came out of Rourke’s mouth in order to expose him as a kind of whacked-out con man¬†who’s “spent his entire adult life playing not fictional characters but an idealized delusional fantasy of himself”. It’s hard to imagine, say, the¬†NYT writing as negatively about¬†Sean Penn or Frank Langella. But that’s because the class-conscious newspaper of record doesn’t place Rourke, long a fixture of straight-to-video¬†feature films,¬†in¬†the same thesp elite category. But, worse, the mag went about this bit of character assassination badly.

Finke also gets a statement from Rourke’s family taking the paper to task for not doing basic fact-checking.