Richly deserved gong for truly golden oldie
WHAT a crying shame that the remarkable achievement of Sir Anthony Hopkins in becoming the oldest person ever to win an acting Oscar has been undermined by all those moaning that this year’s best actor award should have gone to the late Chadwick Boseman.
No, it shouldn’t. If the Oscars are to be taken at all seriously – and heaven knows that was as hard to do on Sunday as it is most years, what with political speechifying, wolf-like ululating and references to parental sex – then the acting prizes need to recognise the year’s greatest performances, and to hell with sentimentality.
Boseman was terrific in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. But in The Father, where he played a man falling prey to dementia, Hopkins was better.
This working-class Port Talbot baker’s son – and recovering alcoholic – is one of the finest screen actors of all time. The single Oscar he already had, for The Silence Of The Lambs in 1992, manifestly wasn’t enough. It’s wonderful that at 83 he’s bagged his second.
Yet he should already have at least another two. I’d have anointed him, before Tom Hanks in Philadelphia and Brad Pitt in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, for 1993’s The Remains Of The Day and 2019’s The Two Popes.
Both films were exquisitely written, yet it’s hard to imagine anyone but Hopkins investing those roles – one, a repressed English butler, the other, a conservative German pontiff – with quite so much pathos.
We all know his acting style practically as well as we know his name. The slight narrowing of the eyes, the barely discernible tilt of the head, the jut of the chin, the whisper, the roar... but his genius lies in the way his audiences believe so utterly in his character while never entirely forgetting they’re watching Anthony Hopkins. That’s not so of all great actors.
84 Charing Cross Road (1987), Howards End (1992), Nixon (1996), Hitchcock (2012). What versatility is contained in those credits, what charm, menace, introspection, charisma. So forget any nonsense about who should have won the Oscar, and instead celebrate the man who did.