‘Starting Over’: The performance Burt Reynolds was adamant deserved an Oscar nomination
Taking home an Oscar is not the be-all and end-all of being an actor, but that doesn’t stop stars from feeling disappointed when a role they’ve worked hard on fails to yield any accolade-garnering results, and you can’t blame them either.
If you’d worked really hard, shapeshifting into another person and dedicating yourself to someone else’s story, you would feel let down when awards season comes and you’ve got nothing to show for it. At the end of the day, Hollywood is one big popularity contest, and you probably can’t help but feel left to fend at the bottom of the food chain if your contemporaries win big and you don’t get to be prom king for work just as good.
Burt Reynolds never won an Oscar, but he had real talent, breaking through in the 1960s with a role in the spaghetti western Navajo Joe. Yet, his skills just weren’t recognised enough. You see, Reynolds did manage to pack many great roles into his career (who can forget Deliverance?), but unfortunately, he picked his fair share of bad ones, too.
Still, his natural charisma and charm allowed him to emerge successful even when he was tasked with a rather dire script, and as a result of his wishy-washy career, he sometimes escaped the eyes of the Academy, even when he’d delivered a performance that was really very good. This is how he felt about a certain 1979 movie, which earned his co-stars Jill Clayburgh and Candice Bergen Oscar nominations, but sadly not him.
He was adamant that his performance deserved an Oscar nomination, though, telling The Los Angeles Times, “I had to campaign like hell to get Starting Over. I remember that I was asked if I was mad I didn’t get nominated for an Oscar with that film. Any answer I gave would have upset somebody, and I came off as a sour-grapes loser. I should have just said, ‘No, I wasn’t angry because I don’t like the looks of the little guy’.”
Of course, he was disappointed, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just water under the bridge. “My perception of what Hollywood thinks of me is that I am potentially a good actor if I had the right material, but ‘I’m not going to be the person who gives it to him’. I’m not bitter at anyone, I’m not angry at anyone. What I am is perplexed why people keep talking about me,” Reynolds added.
The actor eventually roped in an Academy Award nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, which he starred in during the twilight years of his career. It was the perfect role for Reynolds, who played a sleazy porn director named Jack Horner, who allows Mark Wahlberg’s Eddie to transform into the infamous adult star Dirk Diggler. It was much more Oscar-worthy than his performance in Starting Over, which was a weaker effort from director Alan J Pakula.
With that being said, Reynolds is still great in Starting Over, proving that he could do romantic comedy as much as he could do harrowing thrillers like Deliverance (you squirm just thinking about it). Yet, it wasn’t enough to secure him that coveted Oscar nomination, which he assured people he certainly wasn’t bitter about.
