Jim Caviezel up for MTV award.

Jim Caviezel is up for an MTV movie award for "Best Male Performance" for his role as Jesus in The Passion. Take a moment and appreciate how incredibly rare that is--a hyper-violent movie about a suffering savior makes over $350 million in the box office and is embraced (at least in part) by the heartbeat of cool youth culture. Best Male Performance was The Passion's only MTV movie nom., but when you consider the audience, that is a pretty impressive feat itself. Caviezel shares the category with Bill Murray (Lost in Translation), Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai), Johnny Depp (Pirates), and Adam Sandler (50 First Dates). Depp will win, but I'm happy to see Caviezel up there anyway. It is, in fact, more meaningful to me that Caveziel was nominated for the MTV award than if I had heard that he was nominated for an Oscar. If the Academy gives the nomination it will seem like they're just making an obligatory recognition of the highest grossing independent feature ever made. They would appear hopelessly behind in their meaningless honor-- but the MTV award is a sort of "people's choice" award. It's not about stuffy industry professionals. It's about what mass quantities of real, everyday youth culture respects. I can honestly say as I grew up attending public high school that I never thought Jesus would appear on that list. You can follow this link to vote for Jim Caviezel here: MTV Movie Awards