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Winning an award is, for an actor, the thing they all aspire to get one day, especially if it is an Oscar. But not every time it’s a deserving award.
To be honest, acting categories are often, not rigged, but definitely biased. It’s not really about who has delivered the best performance of the year (because it usually never is), but who has had the best PR team, or who needs to win because they have been nominated too many times.
Take the latest edition of the Oscars, for example. Alicia Vikander won for her “supporting” role in The Danish Girl, when she was actually the one with more screen time in the film, even more so than Eddie Redmayne, the alleged star of the movie who was in fact nominated as Best Actor. But she was put in that category because she would have more chances of winning as supporting actress.
And this was mostly because the Best Actress category was an obvious one, with Brie Larson the only possible winner for her role in Room –again, a very supporting role to child actor Jacob Tremblay’s splendid performance, which was completely overlooked.
And if we want to talk about actors getting a long-due award, then let’s talk about Leonardo DiCaprio.
Everyone agrees that he is one of the best actors alive, and he has been deserving an Oscar ever since his breath-taking performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape in 1993, but he has been ignored for 20 years, and the Academy gave him his Oscar at last for The Revenant.
But was it really his best role ever? DiCaprio has given us some powerful performances in so many films that it is difficult to favour one of them above the others. Certainly, it would have made more sense if he had won with a Scorsese-directed role, but life is life, and Hollywood PR wins – eating raw meat and almost freezing to death also wins.
It’s all about who is behind you. About who has hidden interests in making you win; who wants to promote the film you are in or who wants to boost your career so that you can get a leading role in the next big superhero movie.
It’s no secret that Harvey Weinstein is one of the biggest Hollywood moguls, and when he wants one of the actors in his movies to win, he does the impossible to make it happen. He parades them around Los Angeles, calls every Academy member and sends them copies of the films… What he wants, he gets.
These things are not new at all. Even in the 1930s, James Stewart (the Tom Hanks of his generation), received a lot of praise for his film Mr Smith Goes to Washington –a movie so poignant that even The Simpsons paid homage to it in an episode. But yet, he was completely ignored, and to make it up to him, he won as Best Actor the following year for The Philadelphia Story, where he played a mere supporting role and was the third name after Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.
And this has been happening at least once every year ever since. So don’t expect any upcoming awards show to be fair, and if you think that someone who’s won is not particularly deserving, now you know why.
Although some times, winners actually do win because they deserve it. Especially in the SAG Awards. Those are always fair.
