What Sorkin doesn’t seem to appreciate is that great performances don’t have to be like this, and that making acting look easy is in fact skull-splittingly difficult. On the set of the buddy cop drama The Heat, for example, Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy turned up every morning, were painfully funny for eight hours on the trot, and then went home to bed. Almost no performer anywhere, let alone in Hollywood, can do that. Effortlessness is the opposite of easiness. That applies to more conventionally “award-worthy” films too: if Frances McDormand can win an Oscar for Fargo without shadowing a Minnesotan police chief for three years, then surely she deserves all the more credit for that.