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| Henry Fonda -On Golden Pond |
In 1982, seventy-five year old Henry Fonda became the last long overdue star of Hollywood’s Golden Age to win Best Actor for his performance in On Golden Pond. It was perhaps the last nail in the coffin of the old Hollywood system and its’ associated Academy standards. Five years later, a still slick Paul Newman won for The Color of Money and became the last Best Actor winner born before the Academy’s founding. A new age had dawned for the Oscars, but so too had a new barometer of relevancy. The 1980s might be the most interesting decade of the Academy Awards for me, because I think that’s where the transformation into what they are now really began. Hollywood had entered the blockbuster era, while the Academy was concerned about reasserting its’ commitment to prestige. No longer were the most successful or imminently archetypal movies of the time among the Oscar winning elite. Some of the winning movies were hardly even known to the general public. And almost none of the Best Actor winners were among the biggest stars of that decade. However they and the performances they won for are very fascinating, and would dictate going forward some of the Academy’s most enduring preferences and reputational shortcomings.
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| William Hurt -Kiss of the Spider Woman |
After a few decades sparse in biographical portraits winning in this category (between 1942 and 1981, only Paul Scofield and George C. Scott won for playing real people), Robert De Niro finally secured an Oscar in 1981 for his memorable Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. For Academy voters it was a watershed. In the forty years since, seventeen more actors have won for non-fiction performances. De Niro also popularized the transformative Oscar role -his drastic physical metamorphosis becoming a template for legions of future nominees and winners. This decade also saw the first straight actor win for playing a member of the LGBTQ community when William Hurt took home an Oscar in 1986 for Kiss of the Spider Woman. And disabled character dramas came back as a reliable conduit to the Oscar, as evidenced by the back to back wins of Dustin Hoffman in 1989 for Rain Man, and a fresh-faced Daniel Day-Lewis in 1990 for My Left Foot. The kinds of stories that won actors Oscars were becoming more transparent than ever. Even Robert Duvall’s 1984 win, as a washed-up country singer with a troubled past in Tender Mercies, fell into a kind of formula that we might now call “Oscar bait”.
But for all this, the 80s Best Actor category could still be a place of good unpredictability. Three wins went to actors who essentially came out of nowhere and blew audiences away: the aforementioned Day-Lewis was one, but before him was Gandhi’s astounding 1983 winner Ben Kingsley, and F. Murray Abraham in 1985 -whose performance as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus is my personal favourite win in the history of this category. And for audiences perhaps disillusioned with the Academy’s refusal to acknowledge the biggest films of the era, at least one bona fide A-lister received an Oscar in 1988 for a character who on some level defined the decade itself: Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gecko of Wall Street.
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| Anthony Hopkins -The Silence of the Lambs |
Coming into the 90’s, it felt like there was a need by the Academy to prove themselves and their legitimacy to wider audiences. And so they made those concessions. This was finally the decade where they gave the most popular and profitable filmmaker of the last twenty years, Steven Spielberg, an Oscar -two in fact! Much more often too the tastes of the public, the critics, and the Academy aligned. Even if it didn’t always result in wins for the likes of Goodfellas or Pulp Fiction, five of the Best Picture winners were among the highest grossing movies of their respective years, two of these also netting Best Actor wins. The first and perhaps most defining was Anthony Hopkins’ late stage breakout in The Silence of the Lambs, for which he won in 1992 -the only actor to win for a horror film since Fredric March sixty years prior. It was the first of a string of instantaneously iconic winning performances in this category that also included Al Pacino a year later for Scent of a Woman, and Tom Hanks in 1995 for Forrest Gump. Hanks became the second two-time consecutive Best Actor winner (following in the footsteps of the comparable Spencer Tracy), winning for Philadelphia the year before Gump. Hanks was and is one of the most popular movie stars, but its’ noteworthy that his Oscar wins fall in line with the Academy’s aforementioned tendency towards straight actors playing gay characters and neuro-typical actors playing characters with intellectual disabilities. Those predilections would prove difficult to curb even as the Academy adjusted its’ palette. Another popular star of the era, Nicolas Cage, won his Oscar in 1996 by way of a similarly Oscar-attracting self-destructive character type in Leaving Las Vegas.
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| Jeremy Irons -Reversal of Fortune |
In light of this it feels a little unconventional that Jack Nicholson won his third Oscar in 1998 (and second on a James L. Brooks project) for a rather ordinary role in As Good as It Gets, coming between two zealously inspirational performances by Hollywood newcomers: Geoffrey Rush for Shine (won 1997), and Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful (won 1999). Another newcomer won the first Best Actor award of the decade in 1991 for Reversal of Fortune, Jeremy Irons -in a role that emphasized a deeply unnerving and unethical personality. Nine years later another actor would win for such a character, though in a movie not so self-aware, and that has grown more discomforting with each passing year. The win of Kevin Spacey for American Beauty in 2000 is perhaps the most unfortunate blemish on the Oscar record, but it is significant for just how different it was from the other kinds of performances that won during that decade. It’s perhaps a testament to 90s naivete in American pop culture itself that such a movie could be revered, such a character as the creep played by Spacey could be in some small way normalized. In retrospect though, it is apt and perhaps foreboding that that was Oscars’ first big choice of acclaim going into the twenty-first century.
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| Denzel Washington -Training Day |
The Oscars of the 2000s was characterized by regular identity crises as it tried to respond to a changed, unpredictable world and media landscape brought on by such things as 9/11 and the War on Terror. The result was a lot of safe bets among winners, arguably more than at any other period in the awards’ history. Yet at the same time it made history by relinquishing Sidney Poitier of his “token” status three times over. Denzel Washington won in 2002 for his role in the popular Training Day, which alongside Halle Berry’s historic win that same year might have signaled new recognition for black artists at the Oscars going forward. However there has not been a black Best Actor winner since Forest Whitaker’s 2007 win for The Last King of Scotland (and no black Best Actress at all since Berry). The 2000s really saw the takeover of biographic portrayals being shoe-ins for Oscar gold before dominating almost entirely in the 2010s. They were often of a like formula too, that centred on a major figure of relatively recent history and culture designed to be a showcase for a singular performance of focus at the expense of all else. The quintessential example here is Ray, for which Jamie Foxx won the Oscar in 2005; but it also applies to the two gay icons who inspired the Oscar winning performances of once again straight men -Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote (won 2006) and Sean Penn for Milk (won 2009).
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| Sean Penn -Milk |
For a period defined by its’ politics, the 2000s roster of winning roles was starkly apolitical. Academy voters continued to express a somewhat myopic measure for what constitutes great acting, still compelled by feats of physical transformation in actors for example. As De Niro had gained a lot of weight, Adrien Brody lost it for his 2003 Award-winning work in The Pianist (this in an actor who became the youngest ever to win the award). And Jeff Bridges got his own Tender Mercies through Crazy Heart, another film about a faded country musician, for which he won the Oscar in 2010. All of this as Oscar viewership began to sharply dwindle during the 2000s. The decade had started out promising: Russell Crowe managed to win the 2001 Oscar for his old-style Hollywood epic and immense crowd-pleaser Gladiator. But even just a few years later in 2004 in spite of a historic winning streak, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King hadn’t even been allotted a single acting nomination -yet just about every performance in that film has stood the test of time stronger than Sean Penn’s vengeful father in Mystic River. The Best Picture win of Crash in 2006 is where things seem to have really gone wrong -a movie so disliked that it’s become a shorthand for the Oscars fading relevancy. And yet one time after that before the decade was out, the Best Actor Oscar was awarded to someone who really did seem to be giving his best performance in an exceptionally interesting and complex role: Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood in 2008.
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| Eddie Redmayne -The Theory of Everything |
And there really hasn’t been another Best Actor winning performance like it since. Even Day-Lewis’ unprecedented third win for Lincoln in 2013 didn’t quite match up, good as it was. It brings us back to where we started from: the 2010s. And this last decade really continued the trends of the 2000s as viewership continued to go downhill, and as Best Actor goes, it might be the least impressive Oscar decade yet. The Academy pulled out all of the by now customary stops: Eddie Redmayne (won 2015) for playing disabled in The Theory of Everything, Rami Malek (won 2019) for playing a tragic gay icon in Bohemian Rhapsody, three performances involving major physical transformations, two through losing weight, one through copious amounts of make-up. And as mentioned before, most of these wins were for biographic roles, only one of which (Day-Lewis’) was a particularly stirring portrait. It was a decade full of great actors winning for the wrong movies, as few would deny Leonardo DiCaprio, Gary Oldman, and Joaquin Phoenix deserve Oscars, but not for the parts they got them for. DiCaprio’s self-punishment for the gold in The Revenant (won 2016) remains a popular joke. Darkest Hour, for which Oldman won in 2018, is likely to be one of the least memorable movies that he ever made. And Phoenix’s win for Joker most recently seems absurd given it may be one of his worst performances!
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| Colin Firth -The King's Speech |
Yet the roles cannot be discounted. These patterns reveal the Academys’ curious modern acting standards and thus influence the choices made by other actors chasing an Oscar. Naked dedication to a particular aspect of immersion for greater authenticity was prized above all else in the 2010s, whether it be in a body type, an accent, or a speech impediment -as in the case of the decade’s inaugural winner, Colin Firth for The King’s Speech. Only 2017’s winner for Manchester by the Sea, Casey Affleck took home the statue without undergoing such a considerable manifest change. His character was comparably down-to-earth next to a king, a president, a genius, a prime minister, a rock god, and a comic book supervillain. It’s also clear that in spite of being perceived often as grossly out of step with popular cultural tastes, the Academy did care about responding to the zeitgeist. Of all the winning performances during this time, those of Malek and Phoenix were actually rather popular among casual movie fans, which had to have factored into the voters’ minds. And the Academy has demonstrated a love for fulfilling narratives. Only when DiCaprio’s string of losses gained fame as a meme did he actually win. And Matthew McConaughey just happened to receive his Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club in the wake of a number of movies that recontextualized his image and a mere two months after True Detective premiered in 2014 –an extremely fitting culmination of his “McConaissance” comeback. Alternatively, Jean Dujardin’s 2012 win for The Artist makes simultaneously the least and the most sense: an unknown (by Hollywood) Frenchman in a performance way more stylistic than any of that periods’ other Best Actor winners (perhaps comparable to Benigni), yet in a movie that is a love letter to old Hollywood (which voters tend to like) and requiring him to adopt a completely different mode of acting in a show of that kind of intent commitment voters also tend to like. That win aptly illustrates how the Academy is in conflict: stubbornly beholden to its customs, while genuinely desiring to be intrepid. And it can’t have it both ways.
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| Joaquin Phoenix -Joker |
So what now? Going into the first Oscars of the 2020s, things look promising. The awards themselves certainly showed signs of improvement last year, and this year any one of the Best Actor nominees (with perhaps the exception of Oldman) would make for a fitting winner. Except for Oldman, none are for biographical roles, none required transformative emaciation or prosthetics, and only Riz Ahmed took on that Academy favoured extreme dedication to authenticity in his performance as a deaf drummer in Sound of Metal –and he’s not the favourite. Of course it’ll be up to the Oscars of the coming years to know for sure if certain themes for the winners are on their way out permanently -some will always endure as they have for decades, others hopefully are at their end point. Diversity is not just important in the people being nominated but also their performances, and I hope the Academy is starting to recognize that.
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| Dustin Hoffman -Rain Man |
Looking at the evolution of the Best Actor Oscar for over ninety years, where it’s gone, who to, and how it was informed by the times, it’s striking to see how much has changed and how much hasn’t. Portraits of world-shaking leaders and patriarchs and populist heroes have been a staple since the beginning. Troubled characters and antiheroes of a particular dimension show up every decade, and a level of showiness has always paid off. However, though the statue might be the same, the Oscar given to Joaquin Phoenix and the one given to Emil Jannings represent different Academys and different qualifiers of achievement. It’s been a long road, some very unexpected actors and bold performances have been recipient of this Oscar in that time as it has shifted through eras and conventions. Wherever it goes from here, whoever it goes to, will be worth paying attention to. It’s worth remembering the academy is not made up of critics, and each category is voted on by the members it represents. Who they determine the Best Actor to be for a particular role in a particular year says a lot about how they perceive their world and how they watch movies. I think that’s a pretty important thing to be conscious of, and it will certainly be on my mind when they announce on Sunday night towards the end of the telecast who has received the 95th Academy Award for Best Actor.
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