Ahead of the posse

WHO is Billy Bob Thornton and how did he secure two major Oscar nominations last week for a movie which, to date, has been on a very limited release in the US? Thornton's movie, Sling Blade, which marks his directorial debut, earned him Oscar nominations as best actor and for best adapted screenplay. An outsider in the best actor category, Thornton was nominated over more fancied contenders such as Liam Neeson (Michael Collins), Kenneth Branagh (Hamlet), Nathan Lane (The Birdcage) and Daniel Day Lewis (The Crucible).

The nominations for Thornton are all the more remarkable given that Sling Blade has been showing on only four screens in the US and has taken just $340,000 at the box office after 11 weeks in release. However, the movie was pushed all the way to its Oscar nominations by its US distributors, Miramax, who placed regular advertisements in the trade press to extol Thornton's achievements, and sent out videotapes of the movie to the Oscars' electorate. Miramax masterminded the successful Oscar campaigns of My Left Foot, The Crying Game, Il Postino and this year's major multiple nominee, The English Patient.

Billy Bob Thornton will be familiar to readers who saw the arresting 1992 thriller, One False Move, in which Thornton played one of the three main criminals, the redneck psychopath. Thornton also scripted the movie with Tom Epperson, his neighbour in Arkansas since the age of eight, and they collaborated again on the recent inter racial drama, A Family Thing.

Set in Arkansas, like all of his films, Sling Blade is a humorous morality tale featuring Thornton as a recently released mental patient who killed his mother decades earlier and is now trying to shield a young boy from violence. The cast also includes singer Dwight Yoakim, whose song, A Thousand Miles, provides the title for Thornton's next movie. In between working on his personal projects, Thornton keeps busy as an actor for other directors. He recently completed Robert Duvall's The Apostle and is now working on the new Oliver Stone picture, Stray Dogs, in which he plays what he told Village Voice is "a creepy character, so nasty looking you wouldn't want to get within 100 yards of him".