Crazy Heart to pick up after Best Actor win

Crazy Heart benefitted most from its three Oscar nominations and saw its theatre count and box office collections go up each week for over a month in North America. Now, with Jeff Bridges winning a Best Actor award, it has got a powerful boost.

This is the first ever Academy Award for the 60-year-old actor after five nominations, starting in 1971. The film also received an Oscar in the Original Song category.

The $7 movie -- costing half of The Hurt Locker --- had grossed $29.5 million in North America by Sunday. In anticipation of Bridges taking the trophy, its box office gross went up by 36 percent over the weekend. It made about $3.3 million in its 12th week. Now, the film, in which Bridges plays a hard drinking and self-destructive singer who unexpectedly finds a kind of redemption, could reach $40 million in North America alone. With some luck, it may match that amount in foreign territories.

Bridges did his own singing for the role, and did a remarkable, natural acting job too. Though Best Supporting Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal lost out to Mo'Nique for her work in Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, she brings to the film a lot of poignancy and glow as a single mother, who falls in love with the down-and-out singer Bad Blake.

Bridges had earlier won the Screen Actors Guild award and the Golden Globe for his role, and that victory seemed to signal that he was not going to lose the Oscar. He had gained a cult following for playing a stoner in the 1998 comedy movie The Big Lebowski, directed by the Coen Brothers.

Another plus point for the movie is the unbilled cameo by Colin Farrell, who plays a formal protégé of Bad Blake and gets to sing a lovely and rousing duet with Bridges.

The movie, directed by a first timer Scott Cooper, got mixed reviews. Some reviewers said Gyllenhaal and Bridges galvanized an otherwise dull movie.

The Hollywood Reporter called it 'a modest, rather conventional depiction of an aging and alcoholic country musician on a lengthy downward spiral... A fine performance by Jeff Bridges in an otherwise unremarkable movie.'

In Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote: 'There's a powerful symmetry at work in Crazy Heart that's impossible to resist. It's a parallel between protagonist Bad Blake, a country singer whose entire life has led him to a nadir of disintegration, and star Jeff Bridges, whose exceptional film choices have put him at the height of his powers just in time to make Mr Blake the capstone role of his career.'

He added: 'At key points, Crazy Heart displays a welcome integrity and resists choosing the easiest paths.'

The sweet victory for Bridges becomes even more powerful considering the competition: George Clooney in Up in the Air, Morgan Freeman in Invictus, Colin Firth in A Single Man and Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker.