Paul Giamatti was nominated for Cinderella Man and The Holdovers, and his particular register is a clever man who is furious about his circumstances and cannot say so directly.
Sideways is the essential performance, playing a failed novelist and wine snob whose self-pity the film refuses to indulge, and its omission from the nominations that year was widely criticised.
American Splendor, in which he plays Harvey Pekar alongside the real Pekar appearing in the same film, is the formally strange one. He is the son of a Yale president and a baseball commissioner.
