Javier Bardem explains why the Oscars are ridiculous
Commonly known as the Oscars, the Academy Awards are no stranger to the annual fuss kicked up around their arrival, an amuse-bouche to the televised event, which happens around March of every year. Between film fanatics and those featured among the nominations, the night never ceases to spark celebration, some of the most shared red-carpet styling, and the final toast of it all, of course, is controversy.
Between last year’s Barbie vs Oppenheimer hysteria and Will Smith’s “Oscars slap”, each annum brings a fresh conundrum, quaking discussions throughout the industry until the end of awards season, before voting starts again. Rinse, repeat.
But for a Madrid-born actor who has permeated our screens over his three-decade career in Hollywood, controversy does not come naturally. Javier Bardem similarly exists in the thought camp that the Oscars border absurdity—coming from a man who played a bob-sporting, relentless psycho killer in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.
Aptly, at a recent film festival, the actor praised his wife and fellow actor, Penélope Cruz, as he accepted the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 San Sebastian Film Festival. Thus, with his gracious attendance and seemingly warm nature brought to the forefront, it can be questioned again: what exactly is so bad about the Oscars?
The Academy Awards itself was initiated in 1929, taking place in The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. But whilst the golden baton has invariably shape shifted since the debut ceremony, sparking further disagreement as the illustrious figure remains a male bodice, giving the event’s lacklustre approach to gender equality an even sourer after taste, its public voting system remains almost identical.
Having won ‘Best Supporting Actor’ at the Oscars himself in 2008, Bardem yet ceases to support the awards, derailing its tendency to pit actors against actors in a bid for votes—a downgrade from the rewarding yet often tiresome commitment to making movies. As he expressed to the BBC, “It’s an honour. But once you are nominated, you go there to make the campaign…I felt like a w****.”
Continuing, the actor reduces the experience of persuasion between actor and voter as “Hey, excuse me! Vote for me; I am the best”.
An industry juggernaut, between starring in the Dune franchise and cult classics like Eat, Pray, Love, it begs to question whether a goldened statue is the be-all-and-end-all of the creative process after all. “It’s so subjective,” he points out, “At least if we all played gladiators, somebody can say, ‘OK, the best gladiator is you’”, trailing off, at least, with a jovial final note. “But what has a gay Cuban poet got to do with a gladiator? Nothing, man!”
