The 2016 performance robbed at the Oscars, according to Jake Gyllenhaal: “No one can do that but him”
Ever since he burst onto the scene with his role in Donnie Darko, Jake Gyllenhaal has played the Hollywood game incredibly well.
Alongside critically acclaimed turns in Brokeback Mountain and Nightcrawler, he’s also enjoyed great financial success. He’s a recognisable name and face who also seemingly has the freedom to pursue passion projects whenever he wants; whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it right.
In one of his mainstream pursuits, Gyllenhaal followed in the footsteps of so many other superstars and joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to the delight of Tom Holland, and appeared in 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home as Mysterio. A conniving supervillain with the ability to create grand illusions out of thin air, he was one of the best-known Spider-Man villains to appear in a major movie, thereby representing a major responsibility; however, Gyllenhaal was more than up to the task, and the film was a massive success.
Even before he donned the famous fishbowl, he was a great admirer of the superhero genre, and speaking to Vulture, he singled out one particular performer for his brilliance, going as far as to say he should have been nominated for an Oscar.
“I look at Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool, and I say, ‘No one can do that but him’,” he explained, “That is truly, purely him. As an artist, he struggled for several years to figure that out, and it’s all there on the screen. And it’s brilliant.”
Reynolds’ first portrayal of the ‘Merc with a Mouth’ was released in 2016; OK, technically he played Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine seven years earlier, but there’s no way I’m calling whatever that was Deadpool.
After years of trying to bring the fourth wall-breaking mutant to the big screen, Reynolds finally got it over the line and reaped a whole host of success. It ended 2016 among the ten highest-grossing movies of the year, as well as the highest-grossing R-rated movie out there, making Deadpool a worldwide celebrity, leading to two more movies, a bunch of shorts, and more merchandise than you could swing a katana at.
Superhero movies haven’t traditionally performed well with the Academy outside of a few technical categories. Heath Ledger became the first performer to win an acting Oscar for playing a superhero character, when he was posthumously awarded ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for The Dark Knight in 2009, and it wasn’t until 2019 that a Marvel movie was nominated for ‘Best Picture’, when Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther took the world by storm. Considering that the winner that year was Green Book, it has a case for being snubbed.
Every year, the discourse surrounding ‘Oscar bait’ and the snobbery of the Academy grows louder and louder. In Gyllenhaal’s opinion, quality should be considered over genre every time, as he added, “Sure, it’s a comic-book movie, and it’s made a lot of money, but that doesn’t subtract from Ryan’s extraordinary work. Let’s ask ourselves: What else do we want from people who create? Something that is truly them.”
