Of the four acting categories this is the one with the least amount of drama, when predicting the winner.
Leonardo DiCaprio will win this in a walk. I guess it's fun to be catty so all of these memes about DiCaprio wanting an Oscar have popped up, but honestly I don't get in any way shape or form that he took a challenging job with a director who does interesting work in some calculated effort to "finally get his Oscar". If he already had won three Oscars, would he not have been interested in this project? Of course he would. But whatevs.
I honestly wasn't overly impressed with DiCaprio's earliest roles in
This Boy's Life and
What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, the second of which netted him his first nomination. I didn't think he was bad in those roles, I just didn't think he was amazing. But as his career continued, I cannot fault him with his choices. Even if the movies didn't always turn out to be masterpieces, that he was attracted to
The Basketball Diaries and
Total Eclipse instead of being in a string of teen comedies where he could have gotten paid more, and which I'm sure agents all over town were urging him to jump into, is cool to me.
Titanic made him an instant movie star, but with his new found power and celebrity he signed up for movies with Woody Allen and Danny Boyle, consciously playing against his massive success, not pandering to it or trying to replicate it. By the time he started working with Scorsese in
Gangs of New York and
The Aviator, I was finally impressed not just with his choices but with his acting.
The Revenant is his fifth nomination (
The Wolf of Wall Street, Blood Diamond, The Aviator, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?). He is forty-one, with twenty-two years between the first and most recent noms. That's hardly a huge drought, really, in Oscar history terms. If (when) he wins this year, compare him to Paul Newman, a gorgeous and popular movie star of the previous era. Newman finally won his Oscar for
The Color of Money, which was his eighth nomination, with twenty-eight years between his first nod and his win. Oh, and he was sixty-one. Al Pacino (not so gorgeous) didn't win until his eighth nomination (his seventh came the same year, double nominated in lead and supporting categories) at the age of fifty-three, with twenty years between first nom and his win. So that Leo is forty-one with five total nominations isn't a big frippin' deal.
But all of this tangential talk of how long it has been and that he's never won are really secondary to the fact that he is really damn good in
The Revenant. He's not winning this year just because he hasn't won before. He's winning because it's a great performance in a great movie.
None of the other four nominees really have a chance.
After conquering television and rightly winning every award and accolade possible for his towering work as Walter White in
"Breaking Bad", you knew
Bryan Cranston was going to get a couple shots at turning that heat and mighty accomplishment into some starring roles on the big screen. His portrayal of Dalton Trumbo is solid, but I don't think Jay Roach (
Meet the Parents, Austin Powers) made much of a movie. It's watchable, but Peter Askin's 2007 documentary, also titled simply
Trumbo, is a lot better with this same material, and in the specific subgenre of movies about the Hollywood Blacklist, this
Trumbo is nowhere near as powerful or as funny as
The Front starring Wood Allen. Cranston has no shot of winning this year, but hopefully he can add this to his
"Breaking Bad" cred and he finds himself attached to a top shelf project with an A-List director.
Matt Damon is an Oscar winner...though not as an actor. He and Affleck of course won Best Original Screenplay for
Good Will Hunting. Matt was Oscar nominated as Best Actor for that as well (the year Nicholson won for the third time, for
As Good As It Gets), but his only other nomination was as Best Supporting Actor in Eastwood's
Invictus (Christoph Waltz won for
Inglorious Basterds). I think he does a really fine movie star turn in
The Martian, but if he's destined to win an Oscar for his acting he'll have to wait for another flick.
The Actors Branch of the Academy gives
Eddie Redmayne more affirmation by nominating him the year after he won Best Actor (for
The Theory of Everything, if you already forgot). He may well win the Razzie for the Sci-Fi mess
Jupiter Ascending for another of his films this year, and while Redmayne's physicality and vulnerability are appropriate if one-note as Lili Elbe, one of the first known people to attempt gender reassignment surgery back in the 1920s, Tom Hooper's movie is simultaneously dull and shrill. Happily the Oscar voters didn't heap tons of nominations on the film, but understandable why they went with Eddie again. He will not win and join Tom Hanks and Spencer Tracy as the only back-to-back Best Actor winners. But I hope he gets that Razzie.
Michael Fassbender is a terrific actor. Always magnetic on screen (not meant to be a Magneto pun), even when he plays a straight up villain or these darker characters with murky moral centers. Danny Boyle's
Steve Jobs, from an Aaron Sorkin script, is staged and constructed more like a play than a film, and even though Fassbender looks nothing like Steve Jobs and the action of the film is entirely in the form of dialogue, he is captivating. His only other nomination was two years ago, in the supporting category for
12 Years A Slave, but he probably could/should have been nominated for
Fish Tank, Hunger, and
Shame, for starters. In other 2015 releases alone he was also excellent in
Macbeth and
Slow West. He will absolutely win one or two Oscars in his career. But he'll have to wait.
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