The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> when a studio is pushing a performance for award nominations.<\/p>\nThere are a lot of good performances in any given year. We\u2019ve all seen reviews that call a performance \u201cOscar-worthy\u201d without the actor ending up getting nominated or even mentioned by pundits at year\u2019s end predicting those nominations. Some types of performances just seem more like Oscar bait than others. What makes them that way?<\/p>\n
Some of the reasons are apparent to almost anyone who pays any attention during the awards season. Notoriously, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members prefer to honor dramatic roles rather than comic or musical ones. In 1985, a good deal of outrage was expressed\u2014and rightly so–over the fact that Steve Martin was not nominated for his hilarious turn in All of Me.<\/em> Conversely, the nomination of Johnny Depp for a comic role in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl <\/em>created a stir, though few probably thought that he would actually win. (Remember, just being nominated is an honor, as nominees\u2014and who would know better?\u2014often point out.)<\/p>\nSo, actors tend to be nominated for serious roles. Not just any kind of serious roles, though. History teaches us that playing a real person<\/strong> gives one\u2019s chances for a \u201cnod\u201d (as nominations are for some reason now called). From Paul Muni in The Story of Louis Pasteur<\/em> to George C. Scott in Patton<\/em> to Ben Kingsley in Gandhi<\/em> to Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Capote<\/em>, it\u2019s a familiar pattern. In the television age, when famous people\u2019s appearances and behaviors are often familiar to the public, performances can become in part a matter of impersonation, and a skill at mimicry becomes a strong signal of \u201cgood acting.\u201d Undoubtedly a performance like Helen Mirren\u2019s as Elizabeth II in The Queen<\/em> adds subtleties that go beyond the imitation of appearance and speech patterns and other obvious characteristics, but it\u2019s the impersonation that gets talked about more.<\/p>\nEven when we\u2019re not familiar with the person a character represents, for some reason it helps to have \u201cbased on a true story\u201d<\/strong> attached to a title. Publicity often stresses that the actor met and spent time with the real person in order to craft an authentic performance.<\/p>\nObviously making oneself less attractive<\/strong> to play a role gets Brownie points in a big way: Robert DeNiro gaining 60 pounds to play boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull<\/em>, Charlize Theron sacrificing glamor in Monster<\/em>, Nicole Kidman sporting an unflattering fake nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours.<\/em><\/p>\nCharacters with disabilities <\/strong>can definitely put an actor into the Oscar-bait realm: Cliff Robertson in Charly<\/em>, John Mills in Ryan\u2019s Daughter<\/em>, Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot<\/em>, or Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em>.<\/p>\nPresumably the implication of playing a real person or gaining weight for a role or simulating a disability all imply work, harder work than \u201cjust\u201d playing a healthy, good-looking fictional person.<\/p>\n
There are other indicators for nomination likelihood.<\/p>\n
It helps to be old<\/strong>. Think Helen Hayes in Airport<\/em> or Art Carney in Harry and Tonto<\/em>. Their best performances? This year Peter O\u2019Toole may finally get a non-honorary acting statuette.<\/p>\nIt helps to be English<\/strong> and to have done<\/strong> Shakespeare.<\/strong><\/p>\nFor that matter, it helps to speak English<\/strong>. We\u2019ll see if Pen\u00e9lope Cruz ends up being one of the very few to succeed without doing so. She did get nominated for a Golden Globe for Volver, <\/em>but foreign-language films are definitely an afterthought when it comes to Academy Awards.<\/p>\nIt helps to be Meryl Streep<\/strong>, whose performances don\u2019t even have to fit any of these tendencies.<\/p>\nOddly enough, most of these generalizations don\u2019t seem to apply as much to the supporting-actor categories. Presumably \u201csupporting\u201d implies a less bravura turn that doesn\u2019t compete with the stars.<\/p>\n
Of course there are all sorts of reasons why actors get Oscars. A lot of people were surprised in 1997 when Juliette Binoche (The English Patient<\/em>) beat out Lauren Bacall (The Mirror Has Two Faces<\/em>) as Best Supporting Actress. It helps to recall that three years earlier, through a technicality, Binoche had been judged ineligible to be nominated for Best Actress in Three Colors: Blue<\/em>. The injustice of that clearly rankled Academy members (the majority of whom are actors), and the first time they had a chance to make it up to Binoche, they did. Both Jimmy Stewart and Denzel Washington supposedly won their Best Actor awards because voters felt they had deserved them for previous roles.<\/p>\nOn Thursday the Golden Globes nominations were announced. Reporting on the Globes tends to center around their predictive powers for the later Academy Awards. (See \u201cAnd … They\u2019re Off!\u201d in the new Entertainment Weekly<\/em>.) The Globes are just as interesting, though, for the fact that they divide the main film-acting awards into two categories: \u201cDrama\u201d and \u201cMusical or Comedy.\u201d (Two parallel best-picture awards are given in these categories as well, but for some reason the supporting-actor awards aren\u2019t divided by genre.) So Sacha Baron Cohen and Johnny Depp can get nominated for comedies and not have to compete against Will Smith and Forest Whitaker in dramas.<\/p>\nIf you like endless speculation on nominees-to-be, check out the December 2006 Hollywood Reporter<\/em> issue \u201cThe Actor.\u201d In it Stephen Galloway talks about actors playing real people: \u201cWhether a story surrounding a character is biographical or fictionalized, actors are determined to find the truth behind their real-life role models\u201d (\u201cAs a Matter of Fact\u201d). Part of the reason that the trade press devotes so much space to awards speculation is because these special issues sell lots of \u201cFor Your Consideration\u201d ads. This year my favorite one touts Catherine O\u2019Hara as best supporting actress. They don\u2019t even have to tell us the title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kristin here– David and I seem to be swimming against the stream of end-of-year blog entries. No ten-best lists, no predictions about Oscar nominations. Instead, I\u2019ll develop on the theme I introduced in my entry concerning the over-emphasis on star turns in reviews of films that contain an obviously outstanding performance. It\u2019s interesting that quotes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,6,65,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actors","category-film-industry","category-film-technique-performance","category-hollywood-the-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9562,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions\/9562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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