Next Year's Oscar Winners Could Have Irish Connections

By John Mooney

There could indeed be an Irish flair to the 2008 Academy Award presentations. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, based on a 2005 Cormac McCarthy novel, and THERE WILL BE BLOOD, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, have established themselves as favorites for Oscar nominations when they are announced next year.

Daniel Day-Lewis, has already been nominated for a Golden Globe for best actor in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, which is also up for best drama. Day-Lewis plays a man looking to strike in rich in the oil business in turn-of-the- 20th century California. The actor is, of course, best known for winning the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Christy Brown in the 1989 film, My Left Foot.

The Coen brothers' adaptation of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a dark tale of modern West Texas. Josh Brolin, the son of actor James Brolin (and the stepson of Barbra Streisand), plays Llewlyn Moss, a welder who finds and decides to keep more than two million dollars in cash from a drug deal gone awry. His pursuer, Anton Chigurh, chillingly played by Javier Bardem, is hired to recover the cash. Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones plays Sheriff Wells, a man about to retire, who finds himself trying to stop the ghoulish Chigurh's killing spree.

The film has earned four Golden Globe nominations, including best drama, screenplay and direction for the Coen Brothers and a supporting actor nod for Bardem.

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933. The eldest son and third of six children born to Charles Joseph and Gladys McGrail McCarthy, he was originally named Charles (after his father), but later legally changed his name to Cormac after the Irish King.

The family moved to Knoxville in 1937, when his father became a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority for three decades. Cormac attended Catholic High School and the University of Tennessee before joining the U.S. Air Force in 1953. He returned to the university in 1957 and published two stories, "A Drowning Incident" and "Wake for Susan" in the student literary magazine. Calling himself C. J. McCarthy, Jr., he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960.

In 1965, he published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, and followed it with Outer Dark, published by Random House in 1968. Inspired by actual events in Tennessee, Child of God was published in 1973. From 1974-75, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called THE GARDENER'S SON, also based on actual historical events.

In 1979, McCarthy published his fourth novel, Suttree, considered by many to be his finest work. However, the book drew some negative reviews, notably by novelist/historian Shelby Foote.

In 1981, McCarthy was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," which he lived on while writing his next novel, Blood Meridian, a western set in Texas and Mexico during the 1840s and based heavily on actual historical events. It is considered a turning point in his career. (The author visited all the locales of the book and even learned Spanish to further his research.)

Next, All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of "The Border Trilogy," gained excellent reviews and became an immediate New York Times bestseller. Its follow-up, The Crossing, was another smash hit with a first printing of 200,000 copies. The third volume of "The Border Trilogy," Cities of the Plain, united John Grady Cole, the main character of All the Pretty Horses, with The Crossing's Billy Parham in 1998.

This year, McCarthy's fame rose to another level when Oprah Winfrey selected his futuristic novel, The Road, as the April 2007 selection for "Oprah's Book Club." The novel also earned McCarthy the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

An intensely private man, McCarthy has been married three times. He has a son, John, with his current wife, Jennifer, with whom he lives outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. McCarthy also had a son, Cullen, with his first wife, Lee Holleman. (Lee McCarthy is the author of several books of poetry, including Desire's Door.)