Here, in a piece that's mostly about Enough Said:
There's also noise about a campaign for Daniel Brühl, the magnetic German actor who gives a fine, biting performance as the testy Austrian racer Niki Lauda. Although Rush is about the competition between the by-the-book, Ivan Lendl–ish Lauda and the brash, freewheeling asshole live wire James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth, slimming down and stepping up from Thor), and the movie gives their personal lives equal attention, Brühl is for some reason being talked about as a Best Supporting Actor candidate. This is one of those category-fraud moments so brazen that you wonder if the people who made Rush even want the story they have invested so much time and effort in telling to be perceived accurately. Is the movie, as it appears to be, about two intense alpha dudes who are driven to achieve victory in profoundly different ways? Or is it, as the Oscar campaign would suggest, about one big, tall, handsome blond guy and his aspirations and feelings, and only secondarily about this other guy who keeps getting in his way and whose aspirations and feelings the camera and the script sure seem to spend a lot of unwarranted time with? If Lauda is truly meant to be a supporting character in Rush, then everybody involved did a really bad job making the movie. They didn't, and he's not: Instead, Brühl is every Academy Award campaigner's worst nightmare — a super-talented, little-known co-lead with an umlaut in his last name.