There was a Fandango post going around on Twitter a little while ago asking people to pick or rank the Oscar Best Actor-winning performances of the 2010s. Most of the responses were highly negative and critical of the overall quality of the actors and performances that the Academy had singled-out during that decade. And while this would be the response to any other decade of Oscar winners as well (everyone has their particular qualifiers and list of snubs), there is something notably disappointing in looking at that list. By my estimation it includes approximately three good performances (Jean Dujardin in The Artist, Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln, Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea), three performances that are just fine (Colin Firth in The King’s Speech, Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour, Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody), three that are kind of awful (Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club, Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, Joaquin Phoenix in Joker), and one that might be good if it weren’t just a bit too desperate (Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant). Few of these performances are all that memorable, the movies even less so, and as far as the Academy can “get it right” that may not have happened at all during the last decade in this category.
 |
The Best Actor category is one of the most important of the Academy Awards and much as any, is not sacrosanct. It is interesting though the choices that we see being made, the performances being elevated. Emily VanDerWerff pointed out that all but three winning performances of the 2010s (Dujardin, Affleck, and Phoenix) were for actors playing real people, either contemporary or historically significant figures -and it reflects where the Academys’ judgement is now in how they assess great performances. The Oscars have always been a reflection of the current pop cultural zeitgeist, or at least as it pertains to and is perceived by Academy members, and I think the Best Actor category is a curious lens through which to explore that. It also reveals the evolution in ideas of performance and male performance specifically -what exactly it is that makes one worth rewarding.
I should note this is essentially the same thesis employed by Isabel Custodio of the YouTube channel Be Kind Rewind in her excellent video essays on the various Best Actress winners. She goes into far more detail and has a greater wealth of film history knowledge and research to draw upon, so you should definitely check those out. I’m going to be looking at the Best Actor category in broader strokes without such focus on individuals.
 |
| Wallace Beery -The Champ |
That said, we’ve got to acknowledge right up front a theme that has recurred in the history of the Best Actor category, arguably more than in others, and which is of course winners who go on to become problematic. And it goes back to the beginning, when Emil Jannings won the very first Oscar for Best Actor (for his roles in two films, The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh) in 1929, only to be making Nazi propaganda in his native Germany a few years later. 1979’s Best Actor winner for Coming Home, Jon Voight has likewise gone on to make mostly right-wing propaganda, largely sharing the reprehensible politics of 1970’s winner for True Grit, John Wayne. Two-time winner Dustin Hoffman (for Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man) and Casey Affleck have been in recent years implicated for sexual misconduct –the latter during his own campaign season. 1932 winner for The Champ Wallace Beery was a domestic abuser, 1965 winner for My Fair Lady Rex Harrison was likely negligible in the death of Carole Landis. But arguably the biggest stain on the Best Actor category is Kevin Spacey, who not only won the award in 2000, but won it for American Beauty, a movie that uncomfortably parallels what we now know to have been his true crimes. That casts a pretty dim shadow over the prestige of the award, one that on top of all this has been given to seventy-nine white guys and exactly four people of colour. An openly LGBTQ actor has yet to win the award.
 |
| Emil Jannings -The Last Command |
Such a thing would have been unthinkable in the first decade and change of the Academy Awards where masculine ideals of the time were often reflected in the award winners. Warner Baxter followed up Jannings’ pair of melodramatic tragic figures with an archetypal American western rogue, the Cisco Kid, in In Old Arizona. In 1932, the year of the only tie in the awards’ history, Wallace Beery won for playing a grizzled boxer in The Champ, and two years later Clark Gable took home the statuette for a different but just as socially respectable image of masculinity in It Happened One Night. Spencer Tracy won in 1938 for playing the brave noble seaman at the heart of Captains’ Courageous, but by this point a kind of virtuous masculinity was winning awards too, whether for Paul Muni as a brilliant scientist in The Story of Louis Pasteur in 1937, for Tracy himself again as a charitable reverend in Boys Town in 1939, or Robert Donat as a dedicated, beloved pedagogue in Goodbye Mr. Chips in 1940.
 |
| Charles Laughton -The Private Life of Henry VIII |
Only a few actors in this decade won for playing less flattering roles, such as Charles Laughton’s graceless, gluttonous portrait of an English monarch in The Private Life of Henry VIII (won 1934) and Victor McLaglen’s role as an IRA traitor in The Informer (won 1936). Six of the first ten awards went to performances culminating in character death (including both of Jannings’). One of the few to survive was Baxter’s Cisco Kid, who arranges for his lover to die in his place as punishment for her sexual agency. And on that note, female sexual promiscuity is characterized and plays a significant part in the downfalls of Jannings in The Way of All Flesh, and Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (won 1932). Of note as well is how both Beery and Lionel Barrymore for A Free Soul in 1931 played characters dealing with vice, gambling for the former, alcoholism for the latter, that they are portrayed as overcoming. That narrative has remained popular in Oscar movies ever since, as have biopics, three of these early Best Actor recipients winning for such: George Arliss for Disraeli in 1930, and the aforementioned Laughton, and Muni (though The Story of Louis Pasteur is largely fictitious).
 |
| Paul Muni -The Story of Louis Pasteur |
What these first thirteen Best Actor wins show is the Academy just beginning to formulate its’ criteria. In the earliest years it was by design not from a wide array of options, actors like Arliss and Barrymore being awarded perhaps more for the significance and longevity of their careers than the roles nominated. And also a touch of cheating on the part of MGM is clearly palpable (the second Oscars especially were a notorious case of studio favouritism), as was a degree of incompetence -especially regarding that 1932 tie. But we see also emerging trends being recognized in the choices of Baxter or Gable. Gable’s win in particular seemed to mark a greater attention given to celebrity leading men by the Academy, voting Muni and Tracy over character actors like Beery and McLaglen or highly acclaimed thespians like Laughton. There is a shift you can spot too after the implementation of the Production Code in the mid-1930s -the last four Oscars of that decade going to starkly “inspirational” performances.
 |
| James Cagney -Yankee Doodle Dandy |
Rising star Jimmy Stewart was the first Best Actor winner of the 1940s, for his humble performance in The Philadelphia Story. He was followed by a couple other model heroes of American cinema, Gary Cooper for Sergeant York in 1942 and James Cagney for Yankee Doodle Dandee in 1943, both movies catering heavily to wartime patriotism. America had entered the Second World War in late 1941, so naturally the Academy and Hollywood, then in the business of propaganda, rewarded movies and performances that displayed such a favourable political bent. The war cast a shadow over the Academy Awards that entire decade. Seven of the ten Best Actor winners were involved in the war in some capacity, either through propaganda, USO tours, or serving themselves -as was the case for Stewart and 1950’s winner for All the King’s Men Broderick Crawford; and one of the few who wasn’t, Paul Lukas, won his Oscar in 1944 for Watch on the Rhine, a film centred on anti-fascism. The Best Years of Our Lives, one of the most popular films of that decade and likewise heavily war-themed, won Fredric March his second Oscar in 1947 for playing the most upstanding of a trio of vets adjusting to civilian life. In conjunction with this, religion became popular at the Academy, both Cooper and Bing Crosby (for Going My Way in 1945) winning for devoutly Christian roles. And yet, the latter half of the decade saw more interesting performances from Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (won 1946), Ronald Colman in A Double Life (won 1948) and the aforementioned Crawford in All the King’s Men pick up the accolades. And the wins of Colman, who played an actor obsessed with the part of Othello, and Laurence Olivier, who won in 1949 for Hamlet, showed a renewed interest in Shakespeare on the part of the Academy -perhaps in response to Olivier’s 1944 Henry V with its’ own stark parallels to the war.
 |
| Ray Milland -The Lost Weekend |
Removed from the influence of the Second World War as much as is possible, it’s curious to note the pattern of celebrity leading men taking home Oscars continued into the early 1940s, but dropped off a bit as the decade went on. Lukas and Crawford were not big stars, Milland was a leading man but nowhere on par with a Gable or Cooper or Cary Grant, and March and Colman were both significant figures of the previous decade now on their way out as A-listers. Noteworthy too is that while the Best Actress category had seen some crossover with Best Picture winning films (Claudette Colbert, Luise Rainier, Vivien Leigh, Greer Garson), for the Awards’ first seventeen years only Clark Gable managed to do so in the Actor category. But then Crosby won for Going My Way, and with the exception of Colman, the rest of the Best Actors of the 1940s were the stars of respective Best Picture winners. Was this a sign that the Academy was recognizing now with greater acuity just how much performance dictates a movies’ quality, or were they just getting less selective?
 |
| José Ferrer -Cyrano de Bergerac |
Well considering the first Best Picture winner of the 1950s was All About Eve, in which there are no male leads, that string of Best Picture-Actor package deals was broken, but intriguing results continued to appear. Though major stars like an overdue Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper again walked away with the prize for respectively The African Queen in 1952 and High Noon in 1953, the decade began with the little-known José Ferrer winning for the film version of his acclaimed stage performance of Cyrano de Bergerac -the first Hispanic Puerto Rican to win the award. In fact, with the exceptions of Bogart and Cooper, most of the winners of the 1950s were starkly new talent, mirroring the transitory period Hollywood was going through in that decade. Some winners were first discovered only a few years before winning their Oscars. Such was the case of perhaps the greatest of these, Marlon Brando, who won for On the Waterfront in 1955 just four years after breaking out in A Streetcar Named Desire. The turnaround was even quicker for Yul Brynner, winning for only his second movie The King and I in 1957, which like with Ferrer was a role he originated to much acclaim on stage. And with Hollywood changing, the moralistic war years behind them, some curious complexity seeped back into the roles elevated by the Academy’s voting: Bogarts’ gruff and unkempt steam captain, Brandos’ conflicted union labourer. Alec Guinness won the 1958 award for playing the traitorous antihero of The Bridge on the River Kwai, and the next year David Niven took it for playing a soldier accused of sexual assault in Separate Tables. While there was still plenty of recognition for traditional masculine standards in Cooper, William Holden for Stalag 17 (won 1954), and especially Charlton Heston for Ben-Hur (won 1960), the less conventionally attractive Ernest Borgnine earned the Oscar in 1956 for playing a regular guy, an awkward loveless working-class New Yorker in Marty.
 |
| Alec Guinness -The Bridge on the River Kwai |
At the Oscars, the 1950s seemed to be running with what the 1940s had been hinting at in its later years; the voting body had grown, the institution had mutated -founder Louis B. Mayer no longer had any real power in it; and campaigners and voters seemed more interested in performances that could be challenging and different from the Academy criteria of the past. It was the dawn of the Hollywood epic and the grand Hollywood musical, the genres that would dominate the 1960s, and perhaps in this we can see the Academy reflecting a bit more the popular opinion. Guinness and Heston both won for what were the highest grossing films of their respective years, and while Brynner didn’t, he did star in his year’s highest-grossing film as well, The Ten Commandments (1956 was a great year for Brynner -he was also in Anastasia!)
 |
| Burt Lancaster -Elmer Gantry |
And then of course, everything changed in the 1960s, as revolutionary a time for Hollywood as for everything else. The grand new trends of the film industry were adequately reflected at the Oscars: four of the decades’ Best Picture winners were big budget musicals, another two were major historical epics. While these didn’t produce many winners in the Best Actor category, aside from Rex Harrison for My Fair Lady in 1965 and (depending on your definition of epic) Paul Scofield for A Man for All Seasons in 1967, other patterns where Best Actor was concerned started to emerge. The Hays Code being in its waning days and the limitations imposed by it no longer relevant meant greater range was available for a lot of actors. In 1961, Burt Lancaster won for his role as a con artist preacher in Elmer Gantry –it foreshadowed a prevalence of rougher or shadier characters for which the Best Actor trophy would be dolled out. Rod Steiger won in 1968 for playing a racist cop in In the Heat of the Night, and two years later John Wayne finally won after thirty years of trying for the gritty uncouth Rooster Cogburn in True Grit –a subversion of his usual screen persona. Even Lee Marvin, who won in 1966 for his dual performance in the western comedy Cat Ballou, was playing the villain for half that movies’ runtime.
 |
| Sidney Poitier -Lilies of the Field |
Running parallel to this and against the heat of the civil rights movement, was a new attention paid by the Academy to themes of social justice, particularly with regards to race. This was pretty apparent when Gregory Peck beat out Peter O’Toole in 1963 for his immortal portrait of anti-racist defence lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird; and much more so when the next year Sidney Poitier became the first black actor in Academy history to win for his performance in Lilies of the Field –as much as he felt it was merely a tokenized gesture, it was a meaningful one. And then there’s Maximilian Schell’s 1962 win for Judgement at Nuremberg, a performance that challenged American exceptionalism through the lens of a character defending Nazis. Unfortunately, the 1960s marked the beginning of a couple tiresome Oscar touchstones as well, such as the white actor winning for a movie about racism (Peck and Steiger), and the neuro-typical actor winning for playing a character with an intellectual disability, as Cliff Robertson did for Charly in 1969.
Regardless, the Academy did seem to be on the right path in embracing plenty of movies and performances that would never have been considered before. While Hollywood legend and cultural symbol of old masculinity John Wayne may have won Best Actor for the last year of the 60s, the Best Picture win of New Wave titan Midnight Cowboy along with the changes being made to Academy membership by new president Gregory Peck emphasizing younger and more diverse voters, indicated a new Oscar landscape was on the horizon for the 1970s.
 |
| Sacheen Littlefeather |
And was it ever, though not necessarily to the Academy’s preference. The first Best Actor award of the decade was meant for George C. Scott for his titular performance in Patton, but Scott refused to accept it, in part due to his principles against acting-as-competition, but mostly because he despised the Oscars. Two years later, Marlon Brando followed suit in refusing his second Oscar for The Godfather, famously boycotting the awards show and sending activist Sacheen Littlefeather in his stead to protest the portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood -against the backdrop of the Wounded Knee Occupation in South Dakota. It was a sharp dose of politics unheard of in Oscar history and it looked like the Academy was under attack -their grip on prestige not so ironclad. It didn’t help that the 1970s saw a third no-show Best Actor winner due to Peter Finch passing away in 1977 just two months before posthumously winning for his performance in Network. That win though among others showed that politics was indeed on the mind of the Academy, and it would have to be to maintain their reputation in a much more politically charged world. In addition to Finch playing a newsman whose depression is exploited by a soulless, sensationalist media, Jack Lemmon won in 1974 as a middle-aged WWII vet struggling with the anxieties of modern America in Save the Tiger, Jon Voight won in 1979 as a Vietnam vet rendered paraplegic in Coming Home, and Dustin Hoffman won in 1980 as an avatar of the crumbling nuclear family ideal in the divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer.
 |
| Jack Nicholson -One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest |
We also see represented in this batch of winners that evolving model of male performance and masculinity in the Hollywood system, now completely free of the Production Code censorship. Hoffman and Richard Dreyfuss especially, who won in 1978 for The Goodbye Girl, would never have been leading men in old Hollywood. New Hollywood unequivocally emerged victorious at the Best Actor race by the end of the decade, between Hoffman and Voight, Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman in 1972 for The French Connection, even Brando and Scott, both of whom had been making movies long before but got their most iconic roles and Oscar recognition for linking up with Francis Ford Coppola. And it was best epitomized by Jack Nicholsons’ win in 1976 for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest –as part of that films’ clean sweep of the major categories. Coming after the Scott and Brando episodes, and two years of actors winning for not very popular films (Art Carney making the transition from television and beating Al Pacino in 1975 for Harry and Tonto), it seemed to mark a kind of turning point, the Academy seriously recognizing these strange new actors in strange new performances. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely there yet, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked to be catching up to the prevailing culture at last.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment