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| Leonardo DiCaprio is the frontrunner for Best Actor for his performance in The Revenant. |
Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the
Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check
back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.
Best Actor
The nominees are:
Bryan Cranston for Trumbo
Matt Damon for The Martian
Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant
Michael Fassbender for Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne for The Danish Girl
You cannot stop a moving train, especially when this
particular train has been picking up steam for more than two years now. The
world wants to see DiCaprio win an Oscar. The Internet certainly does, and for
the first time, it seems like the Academy is coming around to that view as
well. For the most part, this started two years ago when DiCaprio’s The Wolf of Wall Street performance lost
out to Matthew McConaughey’s more traditional work in Dallas Buyers Club.
There are other exceptional performances this year –
Fassbender and Cranston are particularly memorable – but there is no other
narrative as strong as the one building up around DiCaprio. Damon and Redmayne
have already won Oscars. Cranston is beloved, but he is a first-time nominee.
Fassbender, like DiCaprio a generation-defining talent, will have other
chances. No, the story is DiCaprio and his long-overdue recognition as one of
the best in the business.
Leonardo DiCaprio for
The Revenant – In reality, the
obsession with DiCaprio winning an Oscar started long before The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio has
been one of the biggest stars in the world for nearly 20 years, but even before
Titanic rocketed him to superstardom,
he was an Oscar nominee for What’s Eating
Gilbert Grape? Many felt he was snubbed for Titanic, and in some quarters, a narrative built up that Academy
members might consider DiCaprio too much of a pretty boy whose success was
derived from looks and youth more than talent.
However, DiCaprio made smart choice after smart choice,
rarely faltering in the projects he championed and never turning in a bad
performance. His nominated work on The
Aviator and Blood Diamond, as
well as The Departed and Shutter Island, showed an actor willing
to dig into the psyches of his characters and deliver raw, visceral experiences
onscreen. We associate “getting ugly” with Best Actress winners – such as
Charlize Theron in Monster or Halle
Berry in Monster’s Ball – but the
phenomenon is just as real for Best Actor. Consider McConaughey, Forest
Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland,
and Adrian Brody in The Pianist.
Well, DiCaprio not only “gets ugly” in The Revenant, but he goes feral, eating raw bison liver and
subjecting himself to the many hardships of the frontier all in order to bring
the story of Hugh Glass to life. However, this is more than a physical stunt.
It is a searing, emotional portrait of a man betrayed, adrift, and alone.
DiCaprio has never been better, and no other leading actor this year was this
good. He will win, and in at least one respect, all will seem right.
Michael Fassbender
for Steve Jobs – Interestingly,
the last time Fassbender was nominated, he lost Best Supporting Actor for his
performance in 12 Years a Slave to
McConaughey’s Dallas Buyers Club
co-star Jared Leto. I would have gone the other way, but at least the Academy’s
choice was defensible. What is not defensible is the fact that Fassbender is on
just his second nomination after incomparable work in films such as Hunger, Shame, and Frank. Oh
well, he is in the club now, and he will keep coming back because there is no
other actor like him working today.
Director Danny Boyle’s Steve
Jobs is a frustrating movie with a number of fine elements teetering on the
edge but never tipping over into greatness because the whole exercise feels
just a little too self-conscious. Fassbender, however, is scintillating as the
title character, a business genius whose personal life is in shambles. He creates
chaos everywhere he goes, but because he sits in the eye of the storm,
everything seems perfectly clear to him. Fassbender brings out the frustration
and rage of someone who believes he is better than everyone else and cannot
tolerate playing down to their level.
Bryan Cranston for Trumbo – Speaking of frustration and
rage, we also have Cranston’s blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. A
brilliant wordsmith, Trumbo was persecuted for his political beliefs, and
rather than back down, he fought back with his typewriter. He refused to let
the system shut him up and stood up to become a hero for freedom of expression.
The great thing about Cranston’s performance is that he does not play Trumbo as
a hero. Instead, he shows us a man annoyed by the stupidity and bigotry he must
endure. He battles because it is in his nature to fight. He just happens to be
fighting for a righteous cause.
Cranston is a beloved and respected figure in the industry.
Though he is mostly known for his television work on Breaking Bad, for which he won four Emmys and a Golden Globe,
Cranston has proven to be a popular character actor in films such as Drive, Argo, and Little Miss
Sunshine. He is even the best part of the otherwise disposable Godzilla remake from 2014. In his first
true leading film role, he knocks it out of the park. He will continue to be a
force in this industry for as long as he wants, but this will not be the year
he wins an Oscar.
Matt Damon for The Martian – Damon was the nominee
about whom no one was really certain. There were a few other options hanging
around the edges of the season such as Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Will Smith in Concussion,
but ultimately, Damon prevailed. Looking back, it should not be that shocking –
and if I can toot my own horn, this is the exact lineup I predicted in this
category back at the beginning of December.
Damon carries The
Martian on his shoulders entirely. The scenes back on Earth with the NASA
team and everyone else are important to the plot of course, but the movie does
not work without a tremendous actor playing Mark Watney, the man stranded on
Mars. Damon is the perfect combination of brainy, funny, and sympathetic to
pull off this role. Even in dire circumstances, he remains fun to watch because
he gives the character a spark of mischievousness to counteract the seriousness
of the situation. Everything we feel when watching The Martian is because Damon is able to bring those feelings out in
us.
Eddie Redmayne for The Danish Girl – If Redmayne had
not won this award just last year for The Theory of Everything, this awards race might have been a little closer.
Indeed, some were positing that Redmayne could become the first back-to-back
Best Actor winner since Tom Hanks in 1993-94 and just the third ever. Alas, The Danish Girl did not catch fire,
either at the box office or with the industry, meaning Redmayne’s work does not
have the necessary heat to make history at the Oscars.
The work is solid, and it is mesmerizing to watch Redmayne
make the transition from portraying a confused man to a man becoming a woman
and finally to the woman that man always was. Redmayne finds a number of subtle
notes to play in the transformation, and with his guidance, the audience is
never at a loss to understand the character. By the end, Redmayne simply
becomes Lili, and it is as if that is how it was always meant to be.
The final analysis
There is not much else to say. Cranston and Fassbender each
picked up some early critics’ awards, but that was before the locomotive that
is DiCaprio in The Revenant pulled
out of the station. Since then, DiCaprio has taken everything in sight – the Golden
Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, and the BAFTA, among others. When he wins
an Academy Award next Sunday, it will be one of my favorite moments in Oscar
history, watching my favorite actor accept an award he richly deserves.
Will win:
Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant
Should win:
Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant
Should have been
here: Tom Courtenay for 45 Years
Tomorrow: Best
Documentary
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