The ‘Best Picture’ winner Gary Oldman said didn’t deserve it: “I just scratch my head in wonder”
Every so often, The Oscars dish out a big award to an actor whose career is befitting of the recognition.
But quite often, in doing that, they completely devalue the merit in the individual performance that got them there. For instance, the calls for Leonardo DiCaprio to win Best Actor were so loud that come 2016, had he turned in literally anything up to scratch, he would have eventually bagged the win. Luckily, his performance in The Revenant that year was well above par.
But then two years after the trend of career justice continued with Gary Oldman. In 2018, the legendary British actor was up for Best Actor, alongside Timothée Chalamet for Call Me by Your Name, Daniel Day-Lewis for Phantom Thread, Denzel Washington for Roman J. Israel and Daniel Kaluuya for Get Out.
Coming into the ceremony for his third swing at the big prize, there was an air of inevitability in the room that Oldman would take it. Not only because his legacy deserved one, but because he tackled the definitive Oscar bait role in a Winston Churchill biopic, which combined robbed the worthy winner of his award: Daniel Kaluuya.
Kaluuya’s role in Get Out was simply unforgettable, and thrust his small indie film into cult status. A win for him that year would have validated the ceremony entirely, reminding the industry that merit is at the very heart of an award show win. But instead, and not to Oldman’s fault, the Academy went with the safer, more palatable option as a means of crediting an actor who has put together an Oscar winning back catalogue.
Moreover, Oldman has proved that ill-fitting Oscar winners are fair game. In 2016, the yet-to-be-crowned ‘Best Actor’, set his sights on the most recent ‘Best Picture’ winner, Spotlight, as a means of drawing out the legitimacy of the entire ceremony.
Speaking of his own film first, he said, “There’s a sort of pedigree that [Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy] had, I’d like to think, worthy of such an honour,” adding “Where so many you see, you kind of go ‘really, they won an Oscar for that?’
He continued, highlighting Tom McCarthy’s film in particular as an example of bad taste, “If you think of some of the movies that have been nominated over the years for ‘Best Picture’ – Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia – and then you look at Spotlight, and you kind of go, ‘Best Picture?’ I enjoyed it but, you know, sometimes it gets a little. I just scratch my head in wonder.”
Oldman is right. There is certainly a level of bureaucracy in how The Oscars operate as an awards body. But let’s not forget that the same bureaucracy he highlighted as head scratching was what eventually got him his much sought-after Oscar in the years that followed Spotlight’s win. It’s certainly not a perfect system, which is great for him. Because his turn as Churchill certainly wasn’t a perfect performance. Kaluuya’s was, however.
