The role Eddie Murphy thinks he deserved an Oscar for: “Nobody else could”
It’s become a rite of passage, if not an obligation, for cinema’s biggest comedy actors to play it straight and gun for awards season glory. Since nobody in Hollywood was more popular or more highly paid when he was at the peak of his powers, it made sense for Eddie Murphy to earn his first Academy Award nomination when he did it.
Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls was the first serious performance of the Saturday Night Live alum’s career, and he knocked it out of the park. Everyone had known for two decades that Murphy had charisma to spare, but he was a borderline revelation as Jimmy ‘Thunder’ Early, leaving everyone to wonder why he hadn’t gotten serious much sooner.
Having won the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award, Critics’ Choice Award, and countless other ‘Best Supporting Actor’, he was the hot favourite heading into the Oscars. In what was something between an upset and a snub, Little Miss Sunshine‘s Alan Arkin took home the trophy, and Norbit immediately became the prime suspect.
Murphy disagrees that making the awful comedy, which he’ll defend to the death, and releasing it six weeks after Dreamgirls, killed his chances of Oscar glory, and he’s always maintained that winning one of the industry’s most prestigious and coveted trophies has never really been a goal of his anyway.
That said, in a roundabout way, he suggested that maybe he should have had one already. When asked by The Hollywood Reporter about being overlooked for his work in Dreamgirls when most people assumed his name was as good as engraved on the trophy before the ceremony started, he revealed how he saw things in a different way.
“I never went like, ‘They didn’t take me seriously because I’m a comedian,'” He explained. “I don’t even think like that. There are things that I’ve done that nobody else could do. Nobody else could do Nutty Professor. With Jim Carrey, nobody else could do The Grinch. To me, the performance in The Grinch is just as amazing as Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.”
While he’s using Carrey’s prosthetics-laden turn as the benchmark, and saying it’s every bit as good as De Niro’s seismic and Oscar-winning outing as Jake LaMotta, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and see what he’s getting at. Should Murphy have made the Oscars shortlist for The Nutty Professor? Ryan Reynolds thinks he should, and he’s not alone in believing so.
Murphy was nominated for a Golden Globe in the ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’ in his multi-faced tour de force, but lost out to Jerry Maguire‘s Tom Cruise, who ended up returning it anyway. The Mission: Impossible figurehead was also one of the five contenders gunning for ‘Best Actor’ at the Oscars that year, and he was the only one of the Globes’ comedic nominees to feature in both categories.
He’s repeatedly cited The Nutty Professor as the best work of his career, and maybe it is, but was Murphy’s performance really good enough to exclude either Cruise, The English Patient‘s Ralph Fiennes, The People vs Larry Flynt‘s Woody Harrelson, Sling Blade‘s Billy Bob Thornton, or even the winner, Shine‘s Geoffrey Rush, from the quintet?
