OSCARS W LD
Even when the Academy Awards get it right, history shows it can often be too little too late to recognise an actor’s best work
FEW people would doubt the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Paul Newman, Sissy Spacek, Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss and Russell Crowe were all worthy winners of an Academy Award for their acting talents. Newman was riveting in The Verdict, Cool Hand Luke and The Hustler. Crowe surprised many with his depth in A Beautiful Mind and The Insider. Hoffman transformed himself in Midnight Cowboy and Little Big Man, while DiCaprio announced himself as a teenage sensation in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and years later carried The Wolf of Wall Street. Spacek was spellbinding in Carrie, the film adaptation of the early Stephen King classic. Dreyfuss stole the movie off the shark in Jaws to celebrate his arrival as a major talent.
And therein lies one of the problems the
Oscars can’t seem to address. Those examples alone show six outstanding actors who were overlooked for their best performances, only to take home the award for lesser work.
Three years after turning in the performance of his career, playing a fragile, broken lawyer seeking redemption in The Verdict, Newman won for a veritable walk-through reprising The Hustler role of Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money. Nothing wrong with the performance but it was child’s play for someone of Newman’s scope.
Hoffman won for Kramer vs Kramer and Rain Man in roles that barely stretched him. The first was standard melodrama, the second role required the actor to lock in on the unchanged mannerisms of an autistic savant and press repeat. To make matters worse, the Rain Man Oscar came at the expense of Gene Hackman’s performance for the ages as an FBI agent who simultaneously empathised with and despised the racist southerners he was investigating in Mississippi Burning.
Spacek was overlooked for her early work in Badlands before her breakout performance in Carrie that has become part of popular culture and ignored once again for In The Bedroom. True to the proven formula, of course, she took home the award for playing real-life country music legend Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter and she got extra points for exhibiting her vocal talents.
DiCaprio was the subject of a massive campaign in 2015 to be rewarded for 20 years of stellar work, so he was never going to miss out when he turned in another strong performance in The Revenant. But he’s done better.
Crowe’s win borders on the farcical. One of our greatest exports, whose rare acting ability is often overlooked because of his personal baggage, won for starring in Gladiator. The actor who has captured the essence of a neoNazi sociopath, multifaceted gay caregiver, paranoid schizophrenic mathematician, intense whistleblower and corrupt cop wins it for playing a Hollywood version of a gladiator. Enough said.
Dreyfuss curiously didn’t even get a best supporting actor nomination for Jaws — he was nominated in the best actor category for the British Academy Awards. He’s turned in work of huge range from Mr Holland’s Opus to comedies Tin Men and Let It Ride. In 1977, he gave what may have been the performance of his career as a tortured everyman trying to make sense of the implausible in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the same year he also starred in The Goodbye Girl, and you guessed it, wins the Oscar for playing one of his more standard characters in that film.