Jeff Bridges

For some, not even the heartbreaking finesse of Jeff Bridges' broken country singer Bad Blake can eclipse the pièce de résistance of "The Big Lebowski's" the Dude back in '98. Others would point to "Starman" or "The Last Picture Show." For me, it was 1992's "American Heart," another broken man stumbling toward recovery. But nearly everyone agrees that after five nominations, Bridges was long overdue for his Oscar, and "Crazy Heart" was as good a time as any to recognize one of the finest, most versatile and most authentic actors around.

Tom Kane hates the ads for Mercedes-Benz. It's not the car. It's Jon Hamm. Mercedes uses the "Mad Men" star as the voice of its television and radio commercials. "Even if it is a terrific spot - which it isn't - people don't have a clue who that is," grumbled Kane, a professional voice actor who's done animation, movie trailers and commercials for two decades. QUIZ: Who's that voice? As brand-name advertisers fight for attention in a cluttered media landscape, they are turning increasingly to celebrities such as Robert Downey Jr. (Nissan)

Townes Van Zandt, the tortured Texas troubadour who drank himself into an early grave, had a sad, sly song called "No Deal" in which a used-car salesman hands him the keys to a sedan with no engine and then explains: "You don't need no engine to go downhill, and I could plainly see that's the direction you're headed." The lyric drew a hearty laugh from Jeff Bridges, the actor who is getting perhaps the best reviews of his long and illustrious career for "Crazy Heart," which presents him as country singer Bad Blake who, like Van Zandt, is in desperate need of a spiritual handbrake.

Imagine, if you will, a Hollywood version of fantasy football pitting the likes of Margaret Thatcher, J. Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe and F. Scott Fitzgerald in a head-to-head battle with, well, a bunch of nobodies. Daunting, to say the least. Yet these powerful, iconic, often historical figures are likely to be doing just that this film award season, in a competition that squares them off against such characters as a nebbishy lawyer and an illegal immigrant gardener. It seems evident from the start just who will come out on top: Anecdotally, audiences and voters seem to naturally gravitate toward big-screen portrayals of the powerful, the movers and the shakers, and celebrity types.

When Jeff Bridges won lead actor honors at the Golden Globes last month, he thanked the usual suspects: his loving wife, his agent, his "Crazy Heart" director, his publicist. And then he said something a bit less predictable: "I want to thank my stand-in, Loyd Catlett. We've done over 50, 60 movies together, man. Thank you, Loyd." "When he said my name, I froze for a moment: 'He just said my name,' " said Catlett, who had been watching the show at his San Diego home. "I didn't expect it. It was some form of recognition and thank-you."

Will "Starman" make Jeff Bridges a star? As critics reviewed the movie--the story of an alien/human love affair (co-starring Karen Allen)--they repeatedly raised that question. As one Newsweek article stated: "It's very tempting to say this is the movie that will finally make a star of this extraordinarily gifted and underappreciated (actor)."

"The Open Road" is no Grand Prix winner, but it's no six-car pileup either. It's a low-key road movie that doesn't stray far from the very, very beaten path. Justin Timberlake stars as Clayton Garrett, a struggling ballplayer apparently too thoughtful for his own good. His seriously ill mother (Mary Steenburgen) dispatches him to bring his long-estranged father, a baseball legend, to her hospital bedside. Clayton collects his beloved ex (the enchanting Kate Mara) and sets off to persuade Dad, hurt feelings and all, to see Mom. Here, the film finds its real engine: Jeff Bridges as Kyle Garrett.

Actor Jeff Bridges, star of the summer action thriller "Blown Away" and three-time Academy Award nominee, will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Monday. The veteran actor will have his star placed next to that of his father, actor Lloyd Bridges.

Talk about deja vu. Jeff Bridges felt it when he returned to the hamlet of Archer City, Tex., for the sequel to the 1971 milestone film, "The Last Picture Show." Bridges wasn't alone. Also returning for "Texasville" were Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman, Eileen Brennan, Timothy Bottoms, Randy Quaid and director-writer Peter Bogdanovich. For many of them, "The Last Picture Show" marked the beginning of their film careers.

IN her review of "The Last American Hero" in 1973, Pauline Kael enthused that its star, Jeff Bridges, "may be the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor who ever lived; physically, it's as if he had spent his life in the occupation of each character. Jeff Bridges just moves into a role and lives in it...." Bridges, son of the late Lloyd Bridges and younger brother of actor Beau, is still one of American cinema's most naturalistic, dependable leading men.

Why do so many of us smirk when a Hollywood movie star picks up a guitar and walks toward a live microphone? Maybe it's because, as songwriter Harlan Howard once said, music is about "three chords and the truth" and, really, an actor's day job is about the closest you can come to lying for a living. The question brought a sage smile to the 61-year-old face of Jeff Bridges, the Oscar winner who this week will release his first major-label album, a 10-song collection from Blue Note/EMI called "Jeff Bridges.

A new batch of Disney theme park celebrity advertisements from photographer Annie Leibovitz stars model-actress Olivia Wilde, TV star Alec Baldwin , singer-actress Queen Latifah as well as Oscar-winners Jeff Bridges and Penelope Cruz . Photo gallery : Celebrities play Disney characters Who plays what in the latest advertising campaign:     Olivia Wilde is the Evil Queen from...

Jeff Bridges had to sort through what he calls an "interesting batch of emotions" when the Coen brothers approached him with the idea of playing Rooster Cogburn in "True Grit. " "I said, 'Why do you want to remake that,' you know?" Bridges recalls. "But they were thinking about the book and not the movie, which was a relief for me. I didn't want to be emulating John Wayne. Who would?" He pauses, shakes his head and lets out a laugh. "Who could?" Bridges made the whiskey-soaked marshal enough of his own man to win an Oscar nomination, making Cogburn the 16th film character to earn more than one actor love from academy voters.

? Jeff Bridges, who won the lead actor Oscar last year for "Crazy Heart," is up in the same category for his performance as Rooster Cogburn in "True Grit. " Only two actors have won Academy Awards in the lead actor category two years in a row ? Spencer Tracy won for 1937's "Captains Courageous" and 1938's "Boy's Town," and Tom Hanks earned Oscars for 1993's "Philadelphia" and 1994's "Forrest Gump" ? Two lead performer nominees ? Jesse Eisenberg, 27, ("The Social Network") and Jennifer Lawrence, 20, ("Winter's Bone")

They had fans at the trailer. For weeks, the previews for "Tron: Legacy" have offered a striking look at what digital-age décor could look like. Though the film, which opened Friday, unfolds in a virtual landscape known as the Grid, it also features the midcentury childhood home of hero Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and a modern house made from shipping containers where Flynn's son, Sam (Garrett Hedlund), lives. The most dazzling interior by far, however, is the Safehouse, a glowing hideout at the edge of the "Tron" universe.

"The King's Speech" and "The Fighter" continued to build Oscar momentum Thursday as each film picked up four Screen Actors Guild award nominations. Jeff Bridges and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld received nods for "True Grit" as did Robert Duvall for "Get Low" after those films were ignored in Tuesday's Golden Globes nominations, but neither movie made the cut for the actors group's top award. "The Social Network" received two nominations, one for lead Jesse Eisenberg and the other for cast, seen by many as SAG's version of best-picture Academy Award.

Jeff Bridges has long been one of the greats of American film acting. But because his greatness comes under the deep cover of his characters and with an absence of self-aggrandizement, and because he makes relatively few movies these days, the actor's screen appearances can sometimes take on the weight of a major rediscovery.

Movies occasionally miss their planned release dates: Thanks to production delays, "Titanic" arrived in theaters half a year late, and it hardly suffered. But "The Amateurs" may hold the record for the most postponements -- the Jeff Bridges comedy has had no fewer than six release dates, all of which have come and gone. After so many false starts, "The Amateurs" finally arrives in theaters today, opening in Los Angeles and Dallas.

"Tron: Legacy" is as much legacy as Tron. You can feel the deep imprint left by the 1982 cult classic with every flip of a light disc, every zoom of a Lightcycle, every wrinkle-resistant smile on Jeff Bridges' computer-sanitized face. With a homage around every corner, heavy hangs the crown. As it was in the beginning, "Tron: Legacy" takes us into a glow-stick world inside computers where the games are lethal and the mind can get lost, albeit with new players, a new story line, a new director and nearly three decades of improved technology including all the whiz-bang-wow the latest 3-D has to offer.

It wasn't the celluloid ghost of John Wayne that inspired the Coen brothers to go off into the dusty ravines and bleak prairie land of New Mexico to make "True Grit," their 15th feature film and first western. No, this was a project with a storybook beginning. The Coens grew up in a Minneapolis suburb, the children of academics. And in a house full of books, one of the novels that tugged at their imaginations was "True Grit," the quirky but intense 1968 western by Charles Portis.