Oscar's Best Actor 2021
 

Here are the five performances nominated for Best Actor. Which will win?



Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal
Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Anthony Hopkins, The Father
Gary Oldman, Mank
Steven Yeun, Minari

Re: Oscar's Best Actor 2021
 

Yeah, Boseman will get the award.

Re: Oscar's Best Actor 2021
 

Boseman will take it, even though it was not his best performance, and just because he has recently passed.

Riz Ahmed deserves it more.

This is the only award I think Mank had a shot at, or Riz, but Boseman is winning everything and I don't see that stopping with the Oscars. I have to wonder though if this would still be happening if Boseman was still with us.

I doubt it would have happened if he was still alive. Don't get me wrong. He was a solid actor. I especially liked him as James Brown in Get On Up. Ma Rainey was not my cup of tea and his performance didn't do much for me.

In retrospect, would Peter Finch or Heath Ledger have posthumously won for their performances? I'm biased for Ledger because I really loved his performance as the Joker. But when it comes to Boseman in Ma Rainey or Finch for Network for that matter, I can't say I'm a big fan of either of them getting the award.

Personally, I think Finch still would have won if he had been alive, not so sure about Ledger.

Re: Oscar's Best Actor 2021
 

It's an interesting question. I think Ledger might have won anyway. I think Boseman wouldn't.

I like how we're already talking about it as a foregone conclusion, though. :laugh:

Re: Oscar's Best Actor 2021
 

Ledger would have definitely won. Who else would have?

Re: Oscar's Best Actor 2021
 

<3<3<3<3<3
https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-p...2b6f/3000.jpeg

If anyone has a link to The Father, I would appreciate some assistance. The websites where I usually watch movies, the prints are crooked, grainy, and they actually have commercial breaks! (Grrrrr)

Found a clean copy of The Father and it's a shame that several wonderful performances are going to be overlooked because of Chadwick Boseman's passing.

Yeah, I just looked at the other nominees against Ledger, and he would have won, dead or alive.

Re: Oscar's Best Actor 2021
 

Dang it. I thought Boseman was in the best supporting category for some reason. I gave this to Hopkins. But my choice is Boseman. He will win, for sentimental reasons and the performance.

Anthony Hopkins wins his second Oscar, his first being for his indelible initial go round as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. His performance in The Father was awe-inspiring enough to triumph over the late Chadwick Boseman, who just about everybody thought would join Peter Finch (Network) and Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) as the only posthumous acting winners. Boseman leaves a legacy and a bag full other awards behind, but an Oscar winner he is not.

Hopkins did not accept his award, neither at Union Station in Los Angeles nor at London's BFI Southbank. At eighty-three-years-old he is far and away the oldest to ever win Best Actor. Henry Fonda had held that distinction since the 1982 ceremony when he won for On Golden Pond at the age of 76. He is the only septuagenarian winner. The third oldest is now John Wayne who was sixty-two when he won for True Grit. Hopkins also tops Christopher Plummer as the oldest winner in any of the four acting categories. Plummer was eighty-two when he won Best Supporting Actor for Beginners. Jessica Tandy was eighty when she won Best Actress for Driving Miss Daisy and Peggy Ashcroft seventy-seven as Best Supporting Actress for A Passage to India.

Sir Hopkins did take to Instagram today with a short video from Wales to thank The Academy and acknowledge Chadwick.

Was delighted to see that the great Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor. He certainly deserved it for his profound and memorable role as "Anthony" in The Father-- a portrayal which will likely go into the film history books.

Unfortunately his award alone is not enough to provide the modern day Academy with any credibility. The rest of the major awards were pure PC, divorced from the genuine pursuit of excellence.

Re: Oscar's Best Actor 2021
 

Winning over Boseman and those tragic circumstances is really just a testament to how undeniably great his performance was. I think all of us were willing to accept the posthumous Oscar, a special acknowledgement for such a great career cut short, and hey, no big deal. But winning anyway is just such an incredible exclamation point on one of the best performances in recent memory.

You do realise that it's possible to be critical of what wins and loses without spamming the same complaints about PC culture run amok over and over, right? If anything, all this build-up to a all-but-certain Boseman win right down to restructuring the awards order, putting him last in the In Memoriam and even selling NFTs of his likeness only for the awards body to just end up voting for Hopkins anyway might be the real blow to its "credibility" (such as it is, but these things have always been glorified popularity contests and I don't know how much you can fault them for changing with the times).

As for the actual performances, I think they're about equally good - Hopkins arguably has more to work with due to the comparatively complicated narrative, but both of them hit similarly theatrical beats where good humour slowly but surely gives way to unearthed trauma and eventually full emotional collapse all in the space of a tight 90. It was a solid field of nominees - Oldman is the only one that I'd say is a step below the others and I'd have given the edge to Delroy Lindo in Da 5 Bloods myself - so I'm not about to get worked up over Hopkins winning, but as has been noted, the timing stinks.

Re: Oscar's Best Actor 2021
 

I am happy Hopkins won. I did think of the performances I saw he gave the best performance, and I think his role was difficult to do. I can't really think of another actor working today that could have done it so well. It's one of the rare times, to me at least, when the best performance actually won without regard to any other considerations. He didn't even show up to the Oscars, even over Zoom, which he very easily could have done. He's been disdainful at times about the Oscars, and dismissive of Oscar campaigning, and they still gave it to him because his performance was far and away the best. That's what the Oscars should be about in my opinion. I too wish Boseman was still around to make movies, but nobody gave a better performance than Hopkins in the category.