The Oscars' real people problem
Sunday, April 11, 2021 at 8:20AM
Cláudio Alves in Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Oscar Trivia, Trivia, biopics

by Cláudio Alves

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty tired of the biopic domination of the acting Oscar categories. Admittedly, such distaste comes from my general dislike of prestige cinema's biographical genre, but the situation is truly glaring. This year, 45% of the nominated performances are of real people whose lives were dramatized on-screen, exercises in actorly mimicry, and direct emulation. It's not that these achievements aren't impressive or worthy of awards, but that they're over-represented a great deal. Most narrative films aren't dramatizations of actual events or the lives of celebrities no matter how much AMPAS' selection might make us think otherwise. It's a pity that other kinds of character construction tend to be underappreciated while biopic roles become frontrunners before anyone has even seen the movie…

Real-life characters have been present amid acting lineups since the early days of the Academy Awards. In the second year of the prizes' existence, Corinne Griffith and Lewis Stone were contenders for two such roles. They were Lady Emma Hamilton in The Divine Lady and Count Ludwig Pahlen in The Patriot, respectively. By the awards' third year, we even had our first victorious thespian in a biopic, George Arliss having conquered the Best Actor trophy for his reptilian take on former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Nevertheless, these sorts of roles only represented a small percentage of the honored work, somewhat reflecting the realities of the industry. Not so, today.

The easiest way to show how the phenomenon has intensified is to check out the winning performances over the Oscars' 92 first years. These are the winning star turns that dramatize a person that lived in our world instead of a fictional creation.

BEST ACTRESS

23 out of 95 winners, roughly 24% of winning performances.

 

BEST ACTOR

27 out of 93 winners, roughly 29% of winning performances.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

16 out of 84 winners, roughly 19% of winning performances.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

16 out of 84 winners, roughly 19% of winning performances. 

I excluded characters who are fictionalized versions of actual people whose names were purposefully omitted as well as composite roles. That excludes victors like Jane Wyman and Jared Leto, despite their performances blossoming from real-life events. All that aside, one can see an apparent increase from the 80s onwards, reaching its present apotheosis in the 21st century's first two decades. After all, if one were to expand these considerations to the nominees, we'd see how, for instance, 80% of the last 15 Best Supporting Actor contenders were playing real-life characters. While I love plenty of those performances, it's difficult not to be a bit vexed at these numbers. How did we get to this place, where any English-speaking biopic is automatically an Oscar contender from the instant their production is announced?

We can notice the first clue of the shifting paradigm in the 80s. The decade started with Sissy Spacek and Robert DeNiro's crowning for achievements whose value was often linked to an actor's transformation into a celebrity impersonator. Whether we like it or not, evaluating acting is subjective, an objective opinion about it being a contradiction in terms. In some regard, the biopic aspect of performance offers an easy barometer for assessing technical virtuosity that isn't easy to ascertain with fictional characters. Comparing screen presence to the real-life origin, we can more easily comprehend the performer's choices. It's easy to see what they nail, what they get wrong, what they conspicuously circumvent, change, mutate. Thus, the illusion of objectivity is summoned.

That and Harvey Weinstein twisted the whole system. While it's unnerving to mention that vile man's name, it's hard to discuss Oscar's history without colliding with his perfidious legacy. One of Miramax's earlier successes was My Left Foot, and the campaign mounted for Daniel Day-Lewis created a model to be imitated many times over. We can draw a straight line from the actor's many public appearances celebrating Christy Brown, including in front of the American Senate, to the "honor the movie, honor the man" nonsense that marked The Imitation Game's awards run. By the early 2000s, the strategy had solidified, and biopics were in a FastTrack to gold. Not much has changed in the interim, prestige movie-making having shaped itself around such Oscar-seeking gamesmanship.

At the point we're at, it's starting to be rare to see an acting lineup utterly exempt from any biopic variant. In the past decade, it has happened only twice, with the 2010 Best Actress race and the 2011 Best Supporting Actress lineup. The male acting categories have been lost to real people-mania altogether. Again, it's not that these performances or movies are inherently bad. They're not, and much great cinema has been created by telling stories from real life, from the history books, the newspapers. The problem is a growing lack of variety. Cinema isn't a monolith, but AMPAS has rarely acknowledged that, their particular vices resulting in entire genres being marginalized, nationalities, ethnicities, etc. We don't need a default recognition of prestige studio biopics to add to those problems. Maybe if the Academy wasn't so fixated on real people's stories, Delroy Lindo could have gotten a nod instead of Gary Oldman in Mank. Who knows?

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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