Foxx trades affect for effects

Jamie Foxx came out of … well, not exactly nowhere to win last year’s Best Actor Oscar.

But no one who ever saw Foxx in the show that first brought him fame, Fox Television’s “In Living Color,” would have pegged him as Oscar material.

He proved his doubters wrong with his performance in 2004’s “Ray.” Foxx didn’t just portray the late Ray Charles, he virtually channeled him – turning the Oscar race into little more than a contest for second place.

And now Foxx has returned in a film that opens today nationwide. To follow his Oscar success, he re-emerges in … “Stealth”?

Huh? He follows his Oscar by starring in a film that’s a kind of “Top Gun” goes “X-Men” by way of “2001”?

In other words, pure escapism? Even worse, an exercise in escapism in which he isn’t even the star?

Foxx plays co-star not only to Josh Lucas and Jessica Biel but also a digitally created, A.I.-piloted Stealth jet fighter.

Don’t get me wrong. As I’ve said before, I’m all for escapism – as long as it’s good escapism. And “Stealth” could very well be good (though with the way movies are going this summer, it’s doubtful).

It’s just that you might have thought Foxx and his handlers would have chosen more wisely, considering he has joined the ranks of Hollywood royalty. Sure, given the way movie roles are negotiated, he probably signed up to do “Stealth” and maybe even began shooting before “Ray” ever saw a theater screen.

Even so, one good career motto to follow is “What Would Jack Nicholson Do?” Foxx is no Jack Nicholson (who is?), but everyone could learn something from a guy who started out making films with such lurid titles as “The Cry Baby Killer” and still ended up earning, to date, three Oscars and 12 nominations.

Here was Nicholson’s secret: After winning his first Best Actor Oscar in 1975, for playing the wild man McMurphy in Milos Forman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” he appeared in the Western “The Missouri Breaks.”

And, OK, “The Missouri Breaks” ends up being stolen almost completely by a Marlon Brando who seems merely to be rehearsing for the role he will play three years later in “Apocalypse Now.”

But it was directed by Arthur Penn, of “Bonnie and Clyde” fame, and it came from a screenplay written by novelist Thomas McGuane (“92 in the Shade”) and reworked by the great Robert Towne (“Chinatown”).

So at the very least, it must have looked good on paper, not to mention a bit more serious than, say, “Stealth,” whose director Rob Cohen (“The Fast and the Furious,” “XXX”) is known strictly as an action guy.

Nicholson followed his Best Supporting Actor performance in 1984’s “Terms of Endearment” with 1985’s “Prizzi’s Honor” (winning a Best Actor nomination), his Best Actor performance in 1998’s “As Good As It Gets” with the 2001 mystery/drama “The Pledge” (directed by Sean Penn, another guy who knows a bit about acting).

Talking about rough starts, Jessica Lange – who has two Oscars to show for her half dozen nominations – began her screen career in 1976’s “King Kong.” And the only thing worse that the fondling she endured from a mechanical monkey paw was the mauling she received from the critics.

Yet just six years later Lange rebounded, winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for “Tootsie.” And the same time “Tootsie” was making audiences laugh across the country, “Frances” was playing at art houses, giving those film fans lucky enough to see it a glimpse of two things: One was Lange playing the doomed movie star Frances Farmer; the other was a hint of the dramatic actress Lange would become.

And her very next film? “Country,” which in 1985 won Lange her first Best Actress nomination. And in 1994, when she finally was named Best Actress for “Blue Sky,” she followed it by playing against a future Oscar winner, Halle Berry, in the moving drama “Losing Isiah.”

Finally, let’s look at Tom Hanks. No one started lower than Mr. “Bachelor Party” of 1984. But a decade later he won a Best Actor Oscar for “Philadelphia,” and he’s been nominated four other times, winning once. That other Best Actor win came in 1995 with “Forrest Gump,” which was the first theatrical project that he took following “Philadelphia.”

And following “Forrest Gump”? Hanks starred in a little 1995 film called “Apollo 13,” in which he played astronaut Jim Lovell.

Hey, that must be what Foxx was thinking. An astronaut is kind of like a Stealth fighter pilot.

Right?