The performance Denzel Washington can’t believe didn’t win an Oscar: “Robbed”
Even though he’s got two Academy Awards to his name, Denzel Washington knows a thing or two about being the victim of daylight robbery at the Oscars after being snubbed at least twice, if not more.
Despite his extensive back catalogue of acclaimed performances, a strong case can be made that his titular turn in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X is the finest work of his career, and he was considered by many to be the favourite in the ‘Best Actor’ race heading into the ceremony’s 65th edition in 1993.
It was a crowded field, with Washington up against Unforgiven‘s Clint Eastwood, Chaplin‘s Robert Downey Jr, and The Crying Game‘s Stephen Rea, but it was Al Pacino who emerged victorious when Scent of a Woman finally landed the iconic star his first Oscar win.
It felt more like a lifetime achievement award than a deserved honour, though, and the lasting legacy of Pacino’s Frank Slade is that it introduced ‘Hoo-ah’ to the world. Is it even in Pacino’s top ten? It’s debatable. Is it better than Washington’s Malcolm X? Absolutely not.
Almost two decades later, Washington gave up on the Oscars when Kevin Spacey’s ‘Best Actor’-winning outing in American Beauty trumped his powerful performance as Rubin Carter in The Hurricane, after which point he stopped concerning himself with his chances of having his name read out onstage.
He did win his second Oscar on his next nomination for Training Day and has amassed another five nods since then, making him keenly aware that the best work doesn’t always reap the most prestigious awards. Speaking from a place of experience, then, Robert Redford’s 1980 drama, Ordinary People, left him aghast that its leading lady was snubbed.
“Mary Tyler Moore, she’s really doing something here,” he told The New York Times while rewatching the ‘Best Picture’ winner. “Can you feel it? I wonder why she didn’t win the Oscar. Do you think it’s because she played such an unsympathetic character, or maybe the voters somehow got it into their heads that she’s really like this? I don’t know, but she got robbed.”
In Redford’s feature-length directorial debut, Moore plays Beth Jarrett, the matriarch of a well-to-do suburban family who struggles with a series of tragedies after their teenage son’s accidental death and the attempted suicide of their younger boy, with the once-close clan gradually coming apart at the seams.
The six-time Primetime Emmy winner, who was already an icon of the small screen thanks to The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, scooped the Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress – Drama’ in Ordinary People, which can often be a decent barometer of how the Oscars are going to go.
Much like Washington when he was overlooked for Malcolm X, Moore found herself up against a stacked field of competitors, with The Coal Miners’ Daughter‘s Sissy Spacek winning ahead of Gloria‘s Gena Rowlands, Resurrection‘s Ellen Burstyn, and Private Benjamin‘s Goldie Hawn. After revisiting Ordinary People for the first time in years, he was more convinced than ever that she’d been egregiously robbed.
