IT’S TIME FOR THEIR CLOSE-UPS
It’s not uncommon for actors to be overlooked by Oscar, despite giving great performances.
Peter O’Toole never won an acting Oscar. Nor did Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant or Vincent Price. That right there should tell you how flawed the awards have been, despite the best intentions of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
As we barrel toward awards season and its annual slate of serious awards-bait films, here’s a reminder of many living actors you probably thought already had statues — and the roles they should have won them for.
HARRISON FORD (BLADE RUNNER, 1982)
Ford’s starring turn in this sci-fi classic retains his signature cynicism, even his wry humour. But the central question — is his character Rick Deckard human or replicant? — required him to flex a few new muscles, which he did with such finesse that fans still debate the answer.
GLENN CLOSE
(THE BIG CHILL, 1983)
In a star-crowded movie, Close is its beating heart, displaying the full spectrum of grief in her limited screen time. From sobbing uncontrollably in a running shower to dancing joyfully with her friends to suffocating with guilt from her long-ago affair with the deceased, Close proved she could do anything.
BRAD PITT
(FIGHT CLUB, 1999)
Some characters are icons, some performances are iconic — even if they’re misunderstood. Pitt as Tyler Durden fits both categories. Toxic masculinity may be current buzzword — but David Fincher and Pitt took on the concept two decades ago more concisely than any thinkpiece can manage.
JOHN MALKOVICH
(BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, 1999)
There is no harder role than playing yourself, except maybe playing other people playing you.
EDDIE MURPHY (DREAMGIRLS, 2006)
Murphy disappears completely into James (Thunder) Early, a composite of several R&B singers, most notably James Brown and Little Richard. He’s spirited on stage and morose off it, as he descends into the drug addiction that kills him.
STEVE BUSCEMI (FARGO, 1996)
Everyone around him speaks in thick, Minnesotan accents, politeness hiding any untoward emotion. Not Buscemi’s Carl Showalter, the hit man who questions parking lot attendants about the “limits of your life, man.”
MEG RYAN
(WHEN HARRY MET SALLY ..., 1989)
Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, the diner scene is unforgettable, a true pop-culture touchstone. But Ryan also created a character so indelible, people remember her sandwich order, know how she feels about air conditioning and can recite her sex dreams from memory.
JOHN GOODMAN
(THE BIG LEBOWSKI, 1998)
The Coen brothers created many characters for the hulking actor over the years, but none as quotable as Goodman’s hot-tempered Vietnam vet, Walter. Almost every one of his line readings deserves an Oscar.
TOM CRUISE
(MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — FALLOUT, 2018)
The academy historically rewards great physical feats — the loss or gain of pounds in the three digits; the mastery of a previously unknown skill such as dancing or boxing; or just plain going full Method. So why doesn’t Tom Cruise have an Oscar for doing all his own stunts?
WILLEM DAFOE (PLATOON, 1986)
As Sgt. Elias, Dafoe’s Oscar-worthy scene comes as Tom Berenger’s Barnes holds a pistol to a Vietnamese toddler’s head. When Elias stumbles upon the scene, we see his body go rigid, shock catching in his throat for an instant before he screams and slams Barnes in the face with his rifle butt. But what sells the scene is Dafoe’s eyes, huge and manic and furious and utterly defeated.
MATT DAMON (THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, 1999)
If acting is a process of transforming into someone else, what is it when an actor transforms into someone who is transforming into someone else? That’s the trick of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which finds a young Damon-as-Ripley idolizing, murdering and assuming the identity of Dickie Greenleaf, a cooler, handsomer friend.
LIAM NEESON (SCHINDLER’S LIST, 1993)
Though Neeson wasn’t particularly pleased with his acting in this role, pretty much the rest of the movie-going public was. His brilliance comes from portraying Schindler not as a pure-hearted hero but as the conniving swindler he was.
ANGELA BASSETT (WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?, 1993)
Portraying a real person is a bit of an Oscar-bait cliché, but Bassett is utterly electric when she’s onstage. Offstage, her Tina Turner is a mouse, wide-eyed and lost in the world of record contracts and abusive managers turned lovers. Watching that transition is watching a master at work.
ED NORTON
(AMERICAN HISTORY X, (1998)
With a large black swastika tattooed on his chiselled chest and a pleased sneer on his lips after shooting and curb-stomping a pair of black men in the opening of the film, Norton’s Derek Vinyard is a vivid embodiment of the frightening philosophy we often see on the news today. What makes the performance Oscar-worthy, however, is the way Norton carried the audience from a place of pure contempt to surprising empathy for Vinyard after he’s reformed by a threeyear jail stint.
DON CHEADLE
(HOTEL RWANDA, 2004)
We’ve known Cheadle as an explosive actor — sometimes manic, sometimes hilarious, always an enormous presence. Unfortunately, these towering performances were generally just not in the kind of movies they give Oscars for. Until Cheadle went all in for a film about the Rwandan massacre.
DIANE LANE (UNFAITHFUL, 2002)
As telegraphed by the title,
Lane plays a seemingly happy suburban wife who meets a young Frenchman and launches into a passionate affair. Lane is almost always atremble — be it with erotic joy, suffocating guilt, tingling exultation or crushing self-loathing. Sometimes she expresses it all in a single scene.
JOHN TRAVOLTA (PULP FICTION, 1994)
Decades had passed since his glorious dancing days in Grease and Saturday Night Fever. Before he met Quentin Tarantino, he was appearing in the latest iteration of the Look Who’s Talking franchise. But with this role he was back — not only riffing on his former persona but reinventing himself in the process.
ANNETTE BENING
(20TH CENTURY WOMEN, 2016)
Want to hear a joke? Hilary Swank has two Oscars. Want to hear a better one? She beat out the goddess Annette Bening
FOR BOTH OF THEM. Maybe Bening kept that in mind when approaching her character here. Duty, loneliness and restrained joy make up the core of Bening’s Dorothea, a single mom that co-star Greta Gerwig described as “glorious and complicated and sexy and loving and mistake-filled ... everything that humans are.” We couldn’t have put it better.
RALPH FIENNES (A BIGGER SPLASH, 2015)
There’s a scene in which Fiennes, wearing swim trunks and an unbuttoned short-sleeve shirt, dances almost manically to the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue. The top comment on YouTube is that it’s the “very best thing that has even been filmed in any film ever.”
DONALD SUTHERLAND (MASH, 1970)
Seriously. Dude has never even been nominated for an Oscar. Alan Alda’s wacky, wisecracking version of Hawkeye Pierce became one of TV’s most famous sitcom characters, but forgetting Sutherland’s original take in Robert Altman’s film is a grave mistake.
ROBERT DOWNEY JR. (TROPIC THUNDER, 2008)
“I’m a dude, playin’ a dude, disguised as another dude.” So says Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, the fictional five-time Oscar-winning Australian actor who undergoes “pigmentation alteration” surgery to darken his skin for a role as a black soldier in the big-budget war film within this scathing Hollywood send-up. To see Downey Jr. in blackface in 2008 was shocking, but even more shocking was how uncontroversial it proved to be. The award would have been an admission that, you know what, maybe Hollywood does take itself a little too seriously.
The Washington Post