It’s time: Give Will his trophy
When there is a Will Smith, there is a way. And if he does finally nab a Best Actor statuette on Sunday night, as expected — carried by the front-runner momentum he has powered, already winning the BAFTA, the Screen Actors Guild and the Critics Choice awards, among others — it will be because of one thing: the feeling that It Is His Time. The most potent Oscar campaign narrative of all.
Due. He’s due. A blustery current unto itself, in the makeshift weather of the Academy Awards — taking down anything else in its way — it has long been a yielding strategy. Think Al Pacino finally winning for “Scent of a Woman.” And for this 53-year-old — whose movie stardom now spans 30 years, with two previous nominations in his pocket — the road meets “King Richard.”
(She’s due … psst … remains just as persuasive a narrative, no doubt, in the female categories. At play this year in particular, with Jessica Chastain, whose career may not have the same longevity as Smith’s but whose Best Actress chances are being goosed by the idea that she is a three-time nominee.)
But back to Smith. A natural charm is one thing on the awards circuit, but there is also nothing quite like the right ambassadors. And this is where he has been getting it done, courtesy of Serena and Venus Williams, who have been vouching for him for months. In Oscar, as in politics, having the right surrogates can make all the diff — and the two tennis greats have been great at lending their combined backhand, giving reinforcement to a movie that tells the story of their father. The flattery, alas, has gone both ways.
“Richard Williams is a dreamer like no one you’ve ever known,” said Smith, when accepting the SAG prize. “He has a power of belief that borders on insanity and sometimes tips over the border, which is absolutely necessary to take something from impossible to possible.”
If — when — he does grab the Oscar, the Philly native will join a pretty nifty club within a club: Best Actor winners who started their careers starring in TV comedies. Think: Robin Williams. Like Smith — who became part of the pop culture furniture when he starred in “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — Williams, a very missed star, worked his buffoonery on vintage sitcom “Mork & Mindy” before moving into movies and finally winning an Oscar for “Good Will Hunting.”
Tom Hanks, lest we forget, made the bridge in a big way when he went from the cross-dressing sitcom “Bosom Buddies” in the ’80s to a long trail of Oscar nominations and two wins, for “Forrest Gump” and “Philadelphia.” Check, too: Jamie Foxx. A standup, who joined “In Living Color” in 1991 and then starred in his own self-titled sitcom before walking away with his own Oscar for the biopic “Ray.”
“It is just his moment,” a friend who has been out and about during the awards season rigamarole in L.A. told me the other day, emphasizing how astute Smith has been on the trail without it ever seeming unctuous.
A “moment” that can seem organic — is organic — but has also not been hurt by how visible he’s been in recent months due to a perfect storm of projects: the big movie, combined with the big book (his memoir, simply titled “Will,” came out last fall), plus a prestige nature documentary on Disney Plus, “Welcome to Earth,” and — most poignantly — his just-out, new-generation adaptation of “Fresh Prince” (reimagined as just “BelAir”).
All of that combined can only speak to academy voters in one way: by reinforcing how much of a star Smith remains in an industry with too much content but everdwindling megastars that cross generations and have global appeal. This, while reminding the industry just how much money he has made them. Get this: the “Men in Black” star has drawn a combined $6 billion (U.S.) in global receipts from his movies.
In terms of chops, I have been thinking a fair bit about Smith’s first dramatic role in “Six Degrees of Separation” in 1993, a movie that I rewatched again during the pandemic. It is so good and he is so good in it. Playing a chameleonic con man with a wink and smile, who ingratiates himself in the Upper East Side environs of a bourgeois couple, he more than holds his own against Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland. The charisma that would come to define a career is palpable, but the thing that struck me most on my rewatch was the crackling tension. The kind that makes a fine dramatic actor and was just achieving cruising altitude then.
A tension that has only added to his allure, even off-screen. All the great stars have it: that see-saw between relatability/magnetism and unknowability/mystique. Something that has swarmed the persona of Smith for ages, especially when it comes to his 25-year marriage to Jada Pinkett Smith. If Smith wins, he will stand out another way: the first nominee to talk about his open marriage on the Oscar hustings. He did that when wading into a discussion about it in a recent GQ cover story: “We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way. And marriage for us can’t be a prison.”
These quotes, and more, got a lot of attention, but even that helped to get him visible during a frantic awards season. Headlines, even gossipy ones, keep you relevant in the fame game. And if you have the work to back it up, all the better.
Ultimately, his trump card? It is just that: the work. A writer on the website Gold Derby summed it up best about Smith when they wrote not long ago: “He’s played a prince, a bad boy and a boxer. He’s battled aliens, cowboys and robots. He’s been one of the biggest stars in the world for a quarter of a century. He’s a legend.”
Having earned his pact with us, the audience, it did not even sound especially hokey when Smith recently said in an interview, “We celebrate by creating the next thing,” when asked about the nomination. It sounded, OK, just like Will and perhaps a sneak peek into what might be one of the most momentous speeches on Oscar night.
He went on to say: “We live in celebration of the fact that we get to do this for a living. It’s like every single day is the celebration of the gift to live and work.”