The 10 most undeserving Academy Award ‘Best Actor’ wins
When the inaugural Academy Award ceremony took place in 1929, Emil Jannings won the first ever ‘Best Actor’ prize for his roles in both The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. Since then, almost 100 golden statuettes have been handed out to different actors in an effort to celebrate the finest achievements in cinema.
The Oscars are not the ultimate barometer for cinematic success – after all, one of the film industry’s finest names, Stanley Kubrick, never won awards for ‘Best Picture’ or ‘Best Director’. However, the Academy still possesses a high level of esteem, making their awards the most respected in Hollywood. The ‘Best Actor’ accolade has rightly honoured some of cinema’s most incredible performances, such as Daniel Day Lewis’ role as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood or Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
Yet, the Academy regularly shows its flaws by snubbing some of the best performances of the year in favour of those that lean into Oscar bait territory. Roles taken from historical dramas or biopics are typically favoured by the Academy Awards, often nominating actors that deliver dramatic and spectacular performances rather than muted and reserved ones. Subsequently, the Academy has overlooked some incredibly executed roles in favour of those that are much less memorable (or memorable for all the wrong reasons).
So, from Sean Penn’s melodramatic performance in Mystic River to Rami Malek’s laughable caricature of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, here are ten of the most undeserving ‘Best Actor’ wins at the Academy Awards.
The 10 most undeserving Academy Award ‘Best Actor’ wins:
Art Carney as Harry Coombes (Harry and Tonto, 1974)
Josh Greenfeld’s road movie Harry and Tonto starred Art Carney, better known for his appearance on the sitcom The Honeymooners. Although Carney’s performance as a widowed New Yorker travelling across the country alongside Tonto the cat is by no means bad, the competition he managed to fend off is still shocking.
Unbelievably, Carney’s turn as an elderly man in rather questionable makeup triumphed over Al Pacino’s performance as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II. Additionally, he beat Jack Nicholson for his performance as J.J ‘Jake’ Gittes in Roman Polanski’s stunning neo-noir drama Chinatown.
Gary Cooper as Sgt. Alvin York (Sergeant York, 1941)
Gary Cooper’s performance as Sgt. Alvin York in Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York was certainly convincing enough to inspire movie-goers to head straight to military enlistment offices after watching the film. The actor played one of the most celebrated American soldiers of World War One, and the film, released two years into World War Two, was glaring propaganda.
However, this win makes the list because it left Orson Welles without an Oscar for his incredible performance as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane. The director/actor’s film has endured after decades, partly because of the fantastic performances from the cast, including Welles as the complex protagonist.
Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill (The Darkest Hour, 2017)
Gary Oldman faced stiff competition in 2017’s ‘Best Actor’ category, including Daniel Day-Lewis, Timothee Chalamet, Daniel Kaluuya and Denzel Washington. Oldman’s portrayal of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s The Darkest Hour was good enough, but the actor has given significantly more excellent performances in the past, such as his terrifying role in Leon: The Professional.
The Academy Awards certainly favoured his biopic role, as they so often do, seemingly blinded by the extensive makeup effects used on Oldman. It’s a crime that Day-Lewis did not emerge the winner of the category for his stunning performance as Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread – his last before retiring.
Humphrey Bogart as Charlie Allnut (The African Queen, 1951)
Humphrey Bogart was a fantastic actor, appearing in countless iconic roles during Hollywood’s Golden Age. However, his only Oscar win was awarded to the wrong performance of his – The African Queen. Bogart’s roles in The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, just to name a few, would have been much more worthy of the coveted accolade. Instead, he won for a performance that wasn’t necessarily bad, just not merely representative of his true talents.
Moreover, Bogart’s win meant that Marlon Brando missed out on the prize for his groundbreaking role as Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’sA Streetcar Named Desire, a performance that deserved every accolade thrown its way.
Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury (Bohemian Rhapsody)
In 2018, the ‘Best Actor’ award was awarded to one of its most unworthy candidates – Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. Bohemian Rhapsody was a lousy and woefully inaccurate film that should not have been nominated for ‘Best Picture’, and the fact that it won ‘Best Film Editing’ is still bewildering. But in the spirit of the Academy Awards giving plenty of buzz to Oscar-bait movies, such as biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody, Malek took home the ‘Best Actor’ prize for his overblown parody of the Queen frontman.
Although Malek does the best he can to work from a poorly-written script courtesy of Anthony McCarten, he appears more as an impersonator than a true embodiment of the iconic frontman, whose influence as a performer is subsequently watered down. Christian Bale’s performance in Vice or Willem Dafoe’s mesmerising portrait of Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate would’ve been more worthy winners.
Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins (My Fair Lady, 1964)
Somehow, Rex Harrison managed to win an Oscar for his performance as Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady opposite the magnificent Audrey Hepburn, and she didn’t. As his character attempts to teach Hepburn’s cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle how to fit into high society, he begins to fall in love with her. Whereas Hepburn is endlessly charming, Harrison is considerably more awkward.
Somehow, the Academy found Harrison’s musical role far more worthy of the illustrious ‘Best Actor’ prize than Peter Sellers. Just one of the actor’s three roles in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove was enough to win him the accolade, yet Harrison beat him to the post.
Roberto Benigni as Guido Orefice (Life is Beautiful, 1998)
Roberto Benigni’s darkly comic drama about The Holocaust, Life is Beautiful, was not only written and directed by the comedian, but he starred as the protagonist, Guido Orefice, too. Although the film was critically lauded and faced substantial commercial success upon its release, many critics have retrospectively questioned its union of slapstick comedy with concentration camps.
Benigni plays his annoying character with a little too much enthusiasm, which often feels tiresome. Losing out to the actor was Tom Hanks for his performance in Saving Private Ryan (a much more worthy win than Forrest Gump) and Edward Norton, whose portrayal of a neo-Nazi in American History X was much more striking.
Sean Penn as Jimmy Markum (Mystic River, 2003)
Magnificently, Sean Penn has been nominated five times for ‘Best Actor’, winning the prize twice. His stint as Jimmy Markum, an ex-convict and the distraught father of a murdered teenager, in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, is overly-dramatic, to the point that his performance often becomes bloated and exaggerated.
Penn was certainly a better choice than Johnny Depp, who was nominated for his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. However, his win caused Bill Murray to lose out on a chance of winning an Oscar for his quietly beautiful part in Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola.
Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump (Forrest Gump, 1994)
Tom Hanks won ‘Best Actor’ two years in a row in the mid-1990s, beginning with a nod for his performance as Andy in Philadelphia. However, the following year he was also awarded for his role as the eponymous protagonist in Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump. Looking back, there’s a lot wrong with the comedy-drama, which follows Hank’s title character as he narrates critical events from his life.
Hanks’ performance comes across as a caricature of a mentally-disabled man. With competition from Morgan Freeman (The Shawshank Redemption) and John Travolta, nominated for his career-revitalising role in Pulp Fiction, Hanks’ performance was undoubtedly the wrong pick.
Will Smith as Richard Williams (King Richard, 2021)
Will Smith caused quite a stir at the 94th Oscars ceremony when he slapped Chris Rock around the face following his tasteless joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Not only did his behaviour result in a ten-year ban from attending all future Academy Awards ceremonies, but it overshadowed his win for ‘Best Actor’. He won for his portrayal of Richard Williams, the father of tennis players Venus and Serena, in Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard.
Yet, Smith’s performance wasn’t revolutionary by any means; instead, it played into the Academy’s biopic favouritism. The other nominees in the category, specifically Denzel Washington (The Tragedy of Macbeth) and Benedict Cumberbatch (The Power of the Dog), were more deserving of the award.
