Tom Cruise explains why winning an Oscar would “mean nothing” to him
If it wasn’t already clear beforehand, then by the time we had all awoken from the slumber of a three-year Covid pandemic, there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt that Tom Cruise had evolved from a global superstar into some kind of omniscient cinema demigod. His presence in Hollywood had always been strong since he started in the 1980s, and when the new millennium arrived, his status as the ultimate leading man went unchallenged.
Cut to 2023, and Cruise had grown more powerful than we could have possibly imagined. He’d worked with filmmaking legends like Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, and he’d personally overseen the rebooting of a mildly popular spy TV series from the 1960s into arguably one of the biggest big-budget movie franchises of the 21st century.
No longer just an actor, Cruise was now a producer and executive producer. Top Gun: Maverick, the much-anticipated 2022 sequel to the 1980s classic, was such an unbelievable and genuinely amazing knock-out success that Spielberg personally told him, “You saved Hollywood’s ass, and you might have saved theatrical distribution.”
Such appraisal from the man who literally created the concept of a blockbuster with 1975’s Jaws might as well have been a knighthood. And, with questionable but concrete plans to go into space to make a movie, it looks like there’s nowhere Cruise can’t go. Yet, despite his unequivocably life-saving contributions to cinema, which earned him an honourary Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, Cruise lacks that one coveted golden statue seen as the beacon of cinematic prestige: the Oscar.
It’s mindblowing to think that in over his 50-year career, Cruise has only received four Academy Award nominations: two ‘Best Actor’ nods for Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire, a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his incredible performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 masterpiece Magnolia, and as a producer on Top Gun: Maverick in 2023, which was tipped for ‘Best Picture’. But does he care? Not even remotely. As it turns out, winning the much sought-after award would “mean nothing” to him.
The actor once told the BBC: “I’ve always felt what I do is extraordinary – being able to make these pictures and doing something you love. So, I’ll just keep doing it. I love it,” before emphasising: “I don’t do it for the awards”. Indeed, it seems that irrespective of whether he has an Oscar or not, Cruise has been able to consistently make the movies he wants to make, with audiences more or less lapping it up every single time.
Furthermore, the actor wasn’t brought up to marvel at the awards like many other actors did. He told The Irish Examiner, “I didn’t grow up watching the Oscars, so it’s never been a goal. I wanted to act. People have tried to get me to do a role by saying, ‘This is your Oscar.’ That means nothing to me.”
