The Best Actor race has traditionally been among the most important drivers of the Best Picture race. That has changed somewhat since the “Great Awokening.” Now that Hollywood is starting to thaw out and chill out a bit where the Woketopia is concerned, perhaps that trend will be back, as it was last year with the Best Actor driven film, Oppenheimer. But we’re still more or less under the thumb of the new religion.
Why the Academy has been so male-dominated for so long has less to do with anything sinister, as I used to believe back when I was a lunatic. It’s not “THE PATRIACHY” or sexism. It’s quite simply that people often feel more empathy or camaraderie with characters they identify with. An Academy that is still 70% male and 80% white means that, for the most part, the movies and characters voters identify with the most are when they see themselves on screen.
Hollywood has nearly destroyed itself in their attempts to make everything “fair” and equitable. Nothing is ever fair, not in nature, not in Hollywood. Rather than make it fair, what they really did was borrow from the social justice activists online and re-order the power hierarchy to boost marginalized groups as symbols of virtue or status while de-centering the majority (heterosexual white people, essentially). And that, in my humble opinion, has wrecked storytelling. They’re always telling the same story, and they tell it over and over again: please absolve us of our white guilt and our sins of wealth and privilege.
So what we’ve seen lately are winners who reflect the idealized version of the Left’s opinion of themselves: We’re good people, honest we are. We’re inclusive and diverse, honest we are. So it’s hard to talk about the patterns of what defines winners now because one always has to factor in that extra layer – what will make them seem like good people doing good things?
But be that as it may, we still have an Oscar race to predict. So let’s do Best Actor and where it stands right now before we get to the wins at the Globes and the Critics Choice, then SAG.
The best male performance this year and the person who should win the Oscar is Ralph Fiennes in Conclave. It is a masterful performance with the camera trained on his face for nearly the entire film. His emotions guide the movie. Considering that Conclave is a strong Best Picture frontrunner, that makes Fiennes potentially one of the movie’s big wins.
But the bigger reason for Fiennes is his body of work, which is long overdue for recognition and an Oscar. He should have won for Schindler’s List. I am a big fan of Tommy Lee Jones, but choosing him over Fiennes for The Fugitive was voting malpractice. I don’t know whether Fiennes will win this Oscar but I know he should and he could.
Coming in second would be Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. Much like his Oscar-winning work in The Pianist, it does follow more or less the same note throughout, but what a note. It is painful and powerful work in a film that’s difficult to watch (though mad respect to Brady Corbet for his high ambition). Brody’s character is somewhat opaque despite his ability to translate emotion. Felicity Jones almost steals the movie away from him. If he wins here, it is likely a win for the movie itself, which probably won’t win Best Picture.
And finally, the one many people believe will win in this category — Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. It is a brilliant performance and I would have no objection to his winning for this. I don’t think anyone has captured Bob Dylan quite as well as Chalamet has. He got everything right. The way Dylan walks, chews his nails, sits, and strums the guitar, his playful streak, and his sometimes biting sense of humor. The problem I have with a Chalamet win has more to do with the film itself and its choice to “elevate” the females in the film. I’ll probably get killed for this, but as a die-hard, lifelong Dylan fan, I thought Joan Baez was given far too much screen time in this particular story, and Suze Rotolo was given the short shrift.
But I also more or less resented the idea that the movie about Bob Dylan could have been called “The women in Bob Dylan’s life.” And I’m not sure why that was the choice. This was a moment in history when Dylan defied the status quo and refused to be placed in the box of “folk singer” or “protest singer,” a Woodie Guthrie type of activist. Dylan was what we would call today “based.” He was anti-establishment in the best way. He wanted to follow the muse wherever it took him and it just so happened to take him to one of the greatest careers in music. Had he never “gone electric” no one would remember Bob Dylan.
So as good as Chalamet was, he was relegated to a love triangle story that didn’t really explain what that moment in history was really about. In fact, I’m not even sure James Mangold or anyone on the Left could understand it because they are now the establishment. They are the status quo. Dylan was counterculture – he pushed against what everyone told him to say and think. No one in Hollywood working today can say that. They’re all terrified of losing their careers. Hollywood is dying because there isn’t a counterculture on the Left now. It’s all on the Right.
I enjoyed A Complete Unknown for what it was. And Chalamet very well might win the Oscar. The Academy is, after all, comprised of older boomer dudes as much as it is the newer international voters. He does a brilliant job and, considering he also brought in the blockbuster Dune, it’s not that much of a leap to see him winning.
All three of these performances are Oscar-worthy. I prefer Fiennes because he has become a master of the form of acting and gives the best performance (by a male) of the year. He’s a brilliant actor and long overdue. This performance is one I would call unequivocal.
Can anyone else surprise and win in the Best Actor category? Colman Domingo in Sing Sing perhaps? Absolutely, but the film itself will have to become more prominent in the race for that to happen. Daniel Craig would be the fifth in the category and I guess he could win.
But really, we’re looking at three actors and how the votes will come down. They could split, just as they did the year Adrien Brody won the Oscar – splitting with Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt and Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York. In that case, you could see that it came down to the film itself. By the time the Oscars came around, The Pianist was on the rise. It ended up winning Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was the acting branch that pushed Chicago over for Best Picture.
In this case, it will come down to the three films: Conclave vs. The Brutalist vs. A Complete Unknown. Could Adrien Brody rise again the same way? Well, possibly. Conclave isn’t About Schmidt (which didn’t get a nomination) or Gangs of New York (which didn’t win a single Oscar). But I suppose this win will come down to how voters feel about the movies themselves.
