Jesse says he didn’t watch the nominations on the television

PARK CITY, Utah— Did Jesse Eisenberg, a best actor hopeful for “The Social Network,” watch his nomination unfold?

“I don’t actually have a television,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “What is there to watch?”

And there it is: the generational divide that strikes fear into the hearts of Academy members and — maybe more so – the producers of the Oscars telecast.

On the other hand, Mr. Eisenberg may be representative of nothing more than his own reticence. How did he learn he was nominated? “The way it works is, my publicist, Jennifer, she leaves messages on my machine,” he said, from his home in New York. “During awards season, I’ve developed a weird Pavlovian response to her voice. So now whenever she calls me I perk up, even if it’s bad news.”

Mr. Eisenberg said he hadn’t yet heard from his director, David Fincher, or Aaron Sorkin, the screenplay writer, both of whom were also nominated. “It’s not a group of people that like to celebrate themselves or dwell on this part of it,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll speak to my colleagues, but it’s not the kind of group you’ll find back-patting.”

Right, any other group of people might, say, update their Facebook pages with the news.

“All of us are banned from that Web site,” Mr. Eisenberg said, but he was joking (we think).

Like his colleagues, especially Mr. Fincher, Mr. Eisenberg has an admitted aversion to the lopsided hoopla of awards season. “The truth is, when you work on anything, you put in the same effort, think about it the same way, spend the same time thinking about the character, going to an acting coach,” he said. “One out of many gets this kind of attention and you spend the next year talking about it.” Those endlessly looped conversations, he added, tend to “aggrandize things. It’s very nice to hear this stuff about something you’ve done, or about people you’ve worked with. But at the same time you feel like, it’s enough.”

Perhaps to his chagrin, Mr. Eisenberg is not making any other films at the moment. “I can focus all my anxiety in one direction – one night in February,” he said. He hasn’t watched the Oscars since he was a child.

“I was invited as a seat filler this year and then this morning I got a real ticket,” he said. “That’s a joke I just thought of.” We like, we said. He was still working on the phrasing, he replied.

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