NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Two days before attending his first Oscars ceremony, New Orleans actor and “Hurt Locker” star Anthony Mackie was playing it cool.
The New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts graduate admitted being excited about attending the Academy Awards on behalf of his nine-times-nominated film, of course, but there was an easy, restrained quality to his voice as he said it.
“It’s been a whirlwind,” he said, sincerely but nonchalantly. “We definitely didn’t know what to expect when signing on to all of this, but ‘Hurt Locker’ has kind of come full circle, so we’re just riding the wave.”
By the Oscars on Sunday night, under the glare of the flashbulbs lining the red carpet in front of Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre, that facade began melting away.
“I’m too excited,” he told red-carpet host Robert Osborne in a near shout upon arriving at the mob scene that is a pre-Oscar tradition. “My first Academy Awards ceremony. The Saints won the Super Bowl. It couldn’t get any better.”
A little bit more than three and a half hours later, it got better.
TV cameras watched as he leapt from his seat and lifted co-star Brian Geraghty off the ground in an enthusiastic embrace. The cameras watched as Mackie and Geraghty, along with co-star and best actor nominee Jeremy Renner, rushed the stage. As director Kathryn Bigelow accepted the movie’s sixth Oscar of the night, the three men stood behind her, their arms around each other’s shoulders — brothers in arms — and beamed and hooted and reveled in the moment.
Yeah, it’s been a whirlwind all right, and a long road from the 30-year-old Mackie’s youth in New Orleans’ 7th Ward.
“It was a quintessential New Orleans childhood,” he said. “Played in my school band from elementary to high school. Went to NOCCA (and Warren Easton Senior High), went fishing in City Park — a typical New Orleans childhood.”
But he wasn’t exactly a typical kid. He could act, this one. After NOCCA, it was on to Juilliard and a string of roles that earned him notice on the New York stage. Just like that, a film career was born, bringing praise nearly every step of the way, in films such as “Half Nelson” and another best picture winner, “Million Dollar Baby.”
Then came “The Hurt Locker,” a little film about a big subject, shot in the scorching Jordanian desert about three miles from the Iraq border.
“It was twice as intense (making the film) as it is watching it,” Mackie said. “It was just so hot and so unpredictable. But we had a good time — we tried to have as much of a good time as we could. We had a lot of Iraqi refugees working on the film, and they really gave us the insight of what was going on at the time of the war in Iraq.”
What was really unpredictable is that their little film caught on with critics while hitting the film-festival circuit in late 2008 and early 2009.
“Nobody expected it,” Mackie said. “We knew we were all there for the right reasons and to make a good film, but nobody knew it would be accepted the way it has been. It’s truly been a surprise for everybody involved.”
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