Oscars 2019: The Lead Actors

Renée Zellweger is set to claim another Oscar for "Judy".

Our Oscars analysis is entering its home stretch. Previously, we’ve looked at odds and ends, technical fields, and the supporting actor and actress races. Today, we’re looking at Best Actor and Best Actress. As discussed yesterday, the acting races this year are very boring to predict; they’re also very fun to analyze.


BEST ACTOR

NOMINEES
Antonio Banderas—Pain and Glory
Leonardo DiCaprio—Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Adam Driver—Marriage Story
Joaquin Phoenix—Joker
Jonathan Pryce—The Two Popes

WILL WIN
Phoenix. And honestly, good for him. No, Joker isn’t my favorite Joaquin Phoenix performance—that would probably be Her, though The Master, Inherent Vice, and You Were Never Really Here might all put up a fight—but it’s still a very good one. He deserves to have a trophy on his shelf. Read More

Oscars 2018: The Lead Actors

Olivia Colman in "The Favourite"

With the big show just a few days away, we’re entering the home stretch of our Oscars predictions. Today, we’re looking at the lead actors, where one race is far deeper than the other. Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up with Best Director and Best Picture.

If you missed our earlier installments, you can find them at the following links:

The supporting actors
The screenplays
The big techies
The odds and ends


BEST ACTOR

NOMINEES
Christian Bale—Vice
Bradley Cooper—A Star Is Born
Willem Dafoe—At Eternity’s Gate
Rami Malek—Bohemian Rhapsody
Viggo Mortensen—Green Book

WILL WIN
Malek. He’s won the precursor Triple Crown, and while Film Twitter has spent the past two weeks attacking his performance as simplistic, Film Twitter doesn’t vote at the Oscars. It’s possible to suss out a late-game push from the perennially disappointed Cooper, but that strikes me as a false narrative. Malek takes it. Read More

Oscars 2017: Best Actor and Best Actress

Gary Oldman, set to finally win an Oscar for "Darkest Hour"

So far in our Oscars analysis, we’ve looked at the technical categories (big and small), the screenplays, and the supporting acting races. Today, we’ll run through the two lead acting categories.

Before getting to the nominees, it’s worth noting that one of these two fields is dramatically deeper than the other this year, and it isn’t the one you’d traditionally expect. Thirteen years ago, in analyzing the acting races for the 2004 Oscars, A.O. Scott lamented that, while one could easily compile an alternative quintet to the five men vying for Best Actor, “no such alternative list present[ed] itself” in the Best Actress field. This disparity stemmed, of course, not from any sort of chromosomal difference in talent between male and female actors but from the regrettable lack of strong leading roles for women.

It would appear—and given that I’m talking about Hollywood, I say this with a measure of skepticism—that things have changed. This year, the Best Actress race is positively loaded, highlighting five exceptional performances while leaving out perhaps a dozen more that merited consideration. On the men’s side, there were still a number of impressive star turns, but it was surely less torturous for Academy members to cull their list to a final five.

Does this mean that Hollywood has solved its diversity problem? Yeah, um, not quite. The majority of big-budget movies still star and are marketed toward men, while the percentage of female directors working in the industry remains appallingly low. But if nothing else, this year’s Best Actress race proves (as if it were in doubt) that Hollywood is loaded with gifted women who can dazzle us when given the chance. With luck, soon more of them will receive the opportunity to display their talents behind the camera as well as in front of it.

On to the Oscars themselves. Let’s lead with the less impressive category: Read More