What an Oscar win for Tom Hanks would mean to Pittsburgh

Wouldn’t it be great if Tom Hanks won his third Oscar for a movie about a Pittsburgh icon that was filmed in Pittsburgh?

Hanks is nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his chameleon-like portrayal of children’s television host Fred Rogers in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” It’s the story of a cynical journalist played by Matthew Rhys who’s tasked with profiling Mister Rogers, and ends up getting his help dealing with a personal crisis.

“We’re all happy that Tom Hanks is nominated, especially when he was portraying Mister Rogers, which is the cool part,” said Dawn Keezer, Pittsburgh Film Office director. “It really ties to Pittsburgh more than just an actor acting in some movie here. So, it raises our profile a little bit.”

It’s been a quarter-century since Tom Hanks won his last Oscar (Best Actor, “Forrest Gump”) and nearly two decades since his last nomination (Best Actor, “Cast Away”).

Hanks could easily have been nominated for, if not won, Academy Awards in the years since. Movies like “Road to Perdition,” “Catch Me If You Can” and “Bridge of Spies” received critical acclaim. He also turned in noteworthy performances for “Captain Phillips” and “Sully.”

It almost seems as though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided that since Hanks has already won two Oscars (his first was in 1994 as Best Actor for “Philadelphia”), he’s enjoyed enough honors. This year’s winners will be announced Sunday night during the 92^nd Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. Hanks is up against Al Pacino and Joe Pesci in “The Irishman,” Brad Pitt for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and Anthony Hopkins for “The Two Popes.”

I have an Oscar prediction here. Check it out. pic.twitter.com/KTiSm25QqV

— Paul Guggenheimer (@PGuggenheimer) February 7, 2020

Here are a couple of reasons why Hanks might win:

For starters, Hanks had the daunting task of portraying a man who was a seminal figure in the lives of generations of young people. A graduate of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister who never served in a church but took his pastoral mission to TV and children’s emotional needs.

Rather than deal with the demands of commercial television to hawk sugary cereals and toys to kids, Rogers turned to public television and the WQED studios in Pittsburgh, where he was given the freedom to do the type of show he had always envisioned.

“This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique,” said Rogers in a 1969 speech to Congress on the impact federal funding has on public broadcasting.

“I end the program by saying, ‘You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’ And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.”

He was the same soft-spoken, cerebral man off camera as on — a man who hewed to his own deliberate pace no matter how fast life moved outside of his make-believe neighborhood.

A line uttered by a character in the movie sums it up best. The wife of the journalist writing the story about Mister Rogers, warns, “Don’t ruin my childhood.”

Director Marielle Heller and Tom Hanks on the set of "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood."

And there is the story that Hanks told to late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel about how seriously Pittsburgh residents take Mr. Rogers.

“I was coming down from the gym in the hotel. I was all sweaty and a guy got on the elevator and said, ‘I wish you good luck on the rest of your shooting, Mr. Hanks.’ He got out before me and as the door was closing, he turned and he looked at me and he said, ‘We take Mister Rogers very seriously here,’ ” said Hanks.

“His eyes were snake-like for a second and I’m thinking, ‘I believe I have been threatened in the City of Three Rivers.’ ”

Marielle Heller, who directed “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” deserves credit for rising to the challenge of getting the kind of performance out of Hanks necessary to make the movie believable.

“We viewed it as a responsibility,” said Heller in a November interview in Pittsburgh. “We all feel an ownership of Mister Rogers. Everyone feels like he’s theirs.”

It meant getting Hanks, an actor who brings a lot of sizzle to his big-screen performances, to slow down to a very deliberate Mister Rogers pace.

“With Tom Hanks, he’s a very boisterous, loud, funny guy,” Heller said. “He’s got a lot of energy and so a lot of it was physically trying to slow him down, saying, ‘I want you to find stillness.’ But more of it was about really listening and the space between him and Matthew and how they were listening to each other.”

Tom Hanks and Matthew Rhys in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

Bill Isler, former president and CEO of the Fred Rogers Co., said Hanks captured the essence of Fred Rogers.

“It is as authentic as you could ask for,” said Isler. “Every time I see it, I’m seeing other nuances of Fred Rogers, lines of Fred Rogers, reactions of Fred Rogers. It is an amazing film.”

Keezer was hoping “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” would receive a Best Picture Oscar, just as two previous films made in Southwestern Pennsylvania did — “Silence of the Lambs” in 1992 and “The Deer Hunter” in 1979. But alas, it was not nominated. So Keezer will be rooting for Hanks.

If he wins, she knows he’ll have Pittsburgh to thank.

“Actors will tell you that they are able to give a much more genuine, authentic performance when they are on location in the place where the story happened. That lends to their abilities to be recognized by their peers and by these academies who bestow these awards. So we’re happy.”