The shy and reserved Ralph Fiennes attended the Santa Barbara Film Festival to accept the Performance of the Year award. Fiennes, who is the heart and soul of the most excellent film Conclave, would win Best Picture if there was any justice, as it holds up a mirror to an industry afflicted by much of the same problems the film depicts. It wasn’t intended to be such a self-own, but it has ended up that way because of unforeseeable events.

It’s not easy to be a respectable actor who really does only care about the work having to do the dance of the dog and pony show the Oscars have become. But he is doing what is required of him, as all of them must, if they either want to win an Oscar or at least be remembered by the time these voters sit down to check off their ballots. Who knows what swirls around in the heads of Oscars voters now, I certainly do not. They’ve changed so much in the past ten years, adding 3,000 new members, mostly international voters. SAG has now become SAG-AFTRA and the art of acting is threatened in every imaginable – from content creators to AI… All five of the actors in this year’s race have delivered career-best performances, it’s fair to say. Colman Domingo in Sing Sing, Adrien Brody in The Brutalist, Timothee Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, and I guess Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice. However, I would imagine this is not the best career for him. I imagine he has many more bests to come.

But it’s really Ralph Fiennes who should be taking home a long overdue Oscar, not just for his sublime work in Conclave — the entire movie unfolds on his face — but for his body of work, which includes the paunchy (albeit sexy) Nazi in Schindler’s List, the English Patient himself, and of course, He Who Shall Not Be Named. Fiennes is a genius as an actor and it’s a little shocking he has never won. I chalk that up to his own crippling humility. The Oscar game is a sleazy one in the final analysis. You have to want it bad enough to compromise your own personal sense of decency. That’s what it takes now and what it has always taken. You have to shake hands with bloggers, pose for pictures, attend parties and smile all the way through, pose for magazines, you know the drill. That is obviously easier for some than others.

At any rate, no matter how this race turns out, Fiennes took a bow in Santa Barbra, with a Q&A by the Penske Corp’s star reporter, Scott Feinberg. They need to swap out that thumbnail, just saying.