Image via Complex Original
It’s become a parlour game of sorts to see just how wrong the Academy gets the Oscar nominees each year. The nominations are either so confounding (Remember when Crash won Best Picture?) or painfully predictable (Birdman, Boyhood, The Theory of Everything… basically every Best Picture nominee last year) that you don’t know whether to make the ceremony a drinking game or see if DraftKings is taking bets. Regardless of all this, we all tune in anyways because we love to watch the world’s most beautiful people remind each other of how important they are to the world.
Because we love these beautiful people, we still want to see them win Hollywood’s highest honor, so much so that we even create false narratives about why certain actors deserve one. Leonardo DiCaprio is the front-runner of the most recent campaign for “he deserves an Oscar already,” even though he’s only 41 and been nominated just four times (only half of which—Howard Hughes in The Aviator and Arnie in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape—were justified). He will be just fine, you guys. He’s got a few more years worth of Scorsese movies to make and he’s the leading the Best Actor pack this year for grunting a lot and eating a buffalo liver in The Revenant. This Leo-crusade reached a fever pitch and I blame all of you for making that man feel so desperate.
Unfortunately, Leo is one of the few actors to be gifted this sort of narrative. Many other, probably better actors have been snubbed without any public recourse. Where are their unnecessary standing ovations at the Golden Globes?! So anyways, since these actors and actresses were robbed of tasting Oscar gold, we gave them the next (?) best thing—we put them all on a list.
Eddie Murphy
The Academy has always been particularly hostile to comedic actors and to Comedy in general. The few funnies that have roped in Oscar gold tend to be the precious, quirky festival bait (read: aerated bullshit) that older Academy voters love because it makes them feel edgy and hip. Also, more times than not, they’re rewarded for their screenplay rather than the performances involved. Jack Nicholson (As Good As It Gets), Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine) and Kevin Kline (A Fish Called Wanda) bucked the trend by winning statues for their comedic performances, but these are classically trained dramatic actors who were already critical darlings. What about capital-C Comedian thoroughbreds?
Enter Eddie Murphy. SNL-savior by the age of 19, Golden-Globe nominee at 21 (New Star of the Year for 48 Hours), greatest standup comic alive by 25. Murphy’s genius would extend from the stage to the silver screen for over three decades, solidifying his stature as a global powerhouse. And while the Academy did nominate him for Best Supporting Actor for his commanding turn as Jimmy “Thunder” Early in Dreamgirls, his singular brand of humor would never get the awards recognition it deserved.
Murphy normalized playing multiple characters in his comedies, bringing a polymath’s understanding of empathy, color and dimension to each. From Vampire in Brooklyn, to Bowfinger, or even The Nutty Professor, each personality was diametrically different than the next, and, even if Murphy went blue with fart or fat jokes, each personality contained a deeply layered emotional nuance. He could make you cry laughing, or make you laugh to keep from crying. That’s the stuff that accolades are made of.
It’s like I always say: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that comedies weren’t as prestigious as dramas, and making people laugh should be just as celebrated by the Academy as making people weep.
Robert Downey Jr.
Two-time Oscar nominee Robert Downey Jr. is the biggest star on the planet—which makes me happy—for all the wrong reasons. Instead of a legacy defined by the transgressive roles he once shouldered, he is now part of the pop culture elite for being a serf to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Imagine a return to form where RDJ’s method sensibilities took root again. That intensity, that commitment to the craft of character, that pitch-black humor that was heavier on sharpness than smarminess…man. More Less Than Zero, less The Judge.
Downey should’ve won his first statue back in 2008 for his self-effacing portrayal of a delusional method actor in Ben Stiller’s brilliant Tropic Thunder, but he didn’t stand a chance against the ghost of Heath Ledger, who won the Best Supporting Actor award posthumously for his preternatural performance as Joker in The Dark Knight.
I’m confident once RDJ is wrenched from Kevin Feige’s grasp, Oscar will be waiting with open arms.
Gary Oldman
There are certain things in life that are unadulterated fact: The polar ice caps are melting, bees are dying off at frightening rate, and Gary Oldman is the greatest character actor alive. This is hot science, folks.
Gary Oldman’s performances over his thirty-year career run the gamut of human psychology: the coked-out Ebonics pirate Drexel in True Romance, the Beethoven-listening, scene-chewing psychopathy of Stansfield in The Professional, and the quiet, subtle evil of republican congressman Shelley Runyon in The Contender alone prove that Gary Oldman never wears the same mask twice. He’s made a career out of losing himself in every character he plays without having to toot his own horn about it on the Oscar campaign circuit. I guess the Academy needs him to be more political.
He landed his first and only Oscar nomination back in 2012 for his leading turn in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and it’s a crime against the arts he hasn’t won one yet.
Samuel L. Jackson
15 Words: Pulp Fiction, A Time to Kill, Eve’s Bayou, Jackie Brown, The Negotiator, Shaft, Changing Lanes. Samuel L. Jackson is Hollywood’s most prolific working actor, and arguably the most reliable. Appearing in over 100 movies, Jackson brings the same mixture of fire-and-brimstone intensity, rapid-fire hilarity and unmoving dignity to his leading roles as he does to movies he appears in for 3 minutes. When Sam Jackson walks into a scene, you know it will be electric.
To quote his immortal words, Oscar needs to wake the fuck up!
Colin Farrell
The youngest on this list, Al Pacino once hailed Colin Farrell as the greatest actor of his generation. Disarmingly handsome but teeming with ferociousness and melancholy in equal measure, Farrell crashed through Hollywood’s gate with a string of stirring performances in Tigerland, Hart’s War, Minority Report and Phone Booth. The critical and financial success of the latter two launched Farrell into the A-List stratosphere, which inevitably led to acting for big paychecks. His visibility suffered as these movies translated into flops in the eyes of critics and the court of public opinion.
To conflate bad movies with inseparable bad acting would be an error, because Farrell is too dedicated to phone-in a performance. Rewatch Alexander and admire the sexual zeal of his performance. His brooding Sonny Crockett in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, which he played at age 29, carried the gravity of a veteran actor twice his senior. And the fact that Oscar overlooked his hilariously heartbreaking turn as a broken hitman in In Bruges is beyond comprehension. It’s the best performance of his career, and it should’ve been Colin Farrell hoisting that Oscar statue up that year, not Sean Penn for Milk.
Michelle Williams
Three Oscar nominations before the age of 35? Nothing to thumb your nose at. Michelle Williams shed her delicate Dawson’s Creek image with ease to become one of the most exceptional actresses of this generation. She deftly balances career choices between the arthouse (I’m Not There) and the mainstream (Shutter Island) with equally intoxicating, indelible results. But it was her performance in Blue Valentine that showed her emotional range and her willingness to traverse dark territory with absolute bravery and honesty. Her performance had such a pulsating heart, and she had no qualms with shattering yours while you watched.
Thankfully she has plenty of time ahead of her to snag that elusive Oscar, but that doesn’t mean she should be forced to wait.
Taraji P. Henson
The Academy loves to overlook gorgeous, memorable performances in movies that don’t pander to Oscar’s taste. Why can’t an actor give an award-winning performance in a movie with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 29%? Taraji P. Henson did that in Smokin’ Aces, a silly, bloated, mean-spirited action romp that was surely a tax write off for Universal. But Henson’s lesbian contract killer Sharice Waters provided an air of tempered humor and humanity to a movie full of brash cartoon characters. The tears she pours, coupled with the glass-breaking scream she belts out, while unloading shells from her sniper rifle when she believes her partner-in-crime (Alicia Keys) has been killed will shake you to your core, even more so than the one Barry Pepper let out in that tower in Saving Private Ryan.
That’s not to say Taraji has yet to showcase her range of remarkable talent in great movies. Remember her devastating yet uplifting performance in Baby Boy? Her ultimately redemptive turn in Hustle & Flow? Her pure perfection, even in an underwritten role, in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (for which she got a Best Supporting Actress nomination)? Oscar will eventually see Taraji’s light as soon as they get their heads out of their asses and start honoring a wider scope of films. Sadly, that’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Viola Davis
Like, what planet are we living on that the greatest actress alive hasn’t won a single Academy Award? Just watch this and bow down. And ask for forgiveness.
Scarlett Johansson
Perhaps the geriatric Academy is just angry that someone this young could be this good. Also, Hollywood’s deep-seated misogyny tends to curate roles for women that place a gross importance on how amazing they look over how amazingly they do their job. Scarlett Johansson refuses to be pigeonholed into a surface-only category, and her ample emotional intelligence has shined brightly in plenty of awards-worthy performances.
A little over a year ago she flattened moviegoers with a haunting physical performance in Under The Skin, then turned around and made Her, where her disembodied voice had more life and verve and dimensionality than some of the flesh-and-blood actors on screen.
In such a short period of time in her career, Ms. Johansson is already long overdue for an Oscar.
Rosario Dawson
Rosario Dawson will never be typecast. She’s etched out her position in Hollywood by the sheer volume and diversity of the roles she takes. She can play the ingenue (25th Hour) as believable as she can play innocence lost (Kids, He Got Game). She’s the perceptive heroine amidst the manchildren (The Rundown), and she’s the badass next door not willing to take any shit from the evil that men do (Death Proof).
She is blessed with movie star beauty but can still play the traditional girl next door (Top Five), and she can do whatever the hell she was doing in Sin City. Let’s call it psychosexual punk-rock burlesque. Literally, she does it all and does it better than anyone else.
Chalk this up to another egregious Oscar oversight, but Rosario’s time is coming. Please believe it.