The movie Bill Murray is adamant he deserved an Oscar for: “It was sort of surprising”
Bill Murray probably isn’t the first person you think of when it comes to potential Oscar winners, but as far as he’s concerned, he was robbed of a statuette more than two decades ago. Murray is most widely known for his comedic roles. Coming up on Saturday Night Live in the late 1970s, his low-energy, deadpan sense of humour struck a chord with audiences, and it wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling.
He became a movie star in the 1980s and ’90s, appearing in comedy classics like Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, and What About Bob? In recent years, he’s become a regular collaborator of Wes Anderson, lending his trademark mixture of lowkey comedy and melancholy to everything from Rushmore to The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Starting in the early 2000s, however, Murray has also explored more dramatic work, starting with Sofia Coppola’s 2003 movie Lost in Translation. In the film, Murray stars as ageing movie star Bob Harris, who is on a business trip to Tokyo to film a whiskey advert. He is lonely, jaded, and going through a quiet identity crisis. At his hotel, he meets a much younger American tourist, played by Scarlett Johansson, and they bond over their melancholy worldview.
The film received widespread acclaim upon its release, and Murray’s performance was treated as something akin to a revelation. Audiences had never seen him take on such sombre material, and he proved to be genuinely moving in the role. The film was a hit, earning over $118 million off of a $4 million budget.
When awards season rolled around, Murray was not just part of the conversation but a key figure. He swept many of the awards, taking home the Bafta, Independent Spirit Award, and Golden Globe. The only major precursor award that he didn’t win in the lead-up to the Oscars was the Screen Actors Guild award, which went, oddly enough, to Johnny Depp for the first Pirates of the Caribbean.
The odds were in Murray’s favour for the Oscar, but on the evening, it was Sean Penn who was called up to the stage to collect the award for his performance in Mystic River. “It was sort of surprising,” Murray said in a recent interview with Howard Stern. “I won every other prize for Lost in Translation, so I just sort of thought I was gonna win ’cause I’d won everything — every single one.”
Once he got over the shock and disappointment, Murray came to see the snub as a learning opportunity. Reflecting on the awards campaign, he realised that he’d gotten a little too fixated on winning. “It attracted a low-grade virus of the desire for more,” he said. “I had it for about six months; it had to wear off.” It turned out to be a valuable lesson which he’s aware he never would have learned had he won the award.
Luckily, the loss didn’t deter him from continuing to take on dramatic roles. Two years later, he starred in what many (including Murray himself) would consider his greatest dramatic performance of all, retired tech entrepreneur Don Johnston in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. He hasn’t been nominated for another Oscar since Lost in Translation, but he continues to take on a mixture of comedy and drama, so a win might still be in the cards.
