What Boy Actor Should Have Won an Oscar?

When "The Sixth Sense" was nominated for the Oscars, Haley Joel Osment was nominated along with it. Everyone was hoping he would win, but at the same time knew he wouldn't. Very rarely does a child earn that honor, and as far as I know, no boy actor ever has. Foreign boy actors have won the top award in their own country's award shows (Robinson Stevenin won best actor in France for his role in "La Revolte des Enfants" at the age of ten), but you won't see that in Hollywood. Here is a short list of some (certainly not all) of the boy actors who I personally think should have won an Oscar, or at least have been nominated.

Haley Joel Osment - The Sixth Sense
Kelly Reno - The Black Stallion
Nick Stahl - Man Without a Face
Christian Bale - Empire of the Sun

Please add to this list if you can.

Henry Thomas in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

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Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows


One of my pet peeves about this kind of exercise is that when people say this performance or that movie should have won they rarely place it back in the context of who the other nominees actually were, much less the other deserving possibilities that didn't get nominations either. But for me, looking at the rest of the Oscar field at the 1960 ceremony, yeah, I'd vote for Léaud over the others. The five nominees were Lawrence Harvey in Room at the Top, Chuck Heston as Ben-Hur, Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot, Paul Muni in The Last Angry Man and Jimmy Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder. Heston won the award, and among the other unnominated performances of the year that I really like are Cary Grant in North by Northwest, Max von Sydow in The Virgin Spring, Martin LaSalle in Pickpocket, Eiji Okada in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Breno Mello in Black Orpheus. But for my taste if I had a ballot that included all of them, yeah, I'd still give it to Jean-Pierre Léaud.


But for example to give the Oscar to Henry Thomas for E.T. in 1983, you have to take it away from Ben Kingsley for Gandhi and that means he would have also gotten more Academy votes than the other actual nominees of Paul Newman in The Verdict, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, Peter O'Toole in My Favorite Year and Jack Lemmon in Missing (WOW, what an amazing Best Actor Oscar class) as well as Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo, Gérard Depardieu in The Return of Martin Guerre and the male ensemble casts of Yol and Diner. Henry did a fine job for a tyke, but better than everybody on that list? Seems like a stretch. I don't see how he even makes the cut for top five. Besides all that, there was another very good performance by a child: Bertil Guve in Bergman's Fanny & Alexander.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

I was actually thinking of "or at least been nominated", and since Osment was nominated Best Supporting Actor, I took it for granted that we were talking about the Supporting category. The nominees were: Charles Durning (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas), winner Louis Gossett Jr. (An Officer and a Gentleman), John Lithgow (The World According to Garp), James Mason (The Verdict) and Robert Preston (Victor Victoria). Henry Thomas should be able to crack into that field.

Another boy besides Osment who actually got a nomination was eight-year-old Justin Henry for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). The Oscar for Best Supporting Actor actually went to the other end of the age spectrum that year: Melvyn Douglas, who was just shy of his seventy-ninth birthday, for his work in Being There. The other three nominees were Bobby Duvall in Apocalypse Now, Frederic Forrest in The Rose and Mickey Rooney instead of either his young co-star or the horse in The Black Stallion. Justin is still the youngest person to be nominated for a competitive Oscar.


Jackie Cooper is the youngest nominee for Best Actor, being only nine when he got the nod for Skippy in 1931. Haley Joel Osment's nomination is the second youngest for Supporting Actor, though he was only one single day older than Shane's Brandon De Wilde when he was nominated in 1954. Timothy Hutton's Ordinary People win at the age of twenty and Adrien Brody's Pianist win at the age of twenty-nine are the youngest for those who have actually been named Best Supporting and Best Actor at the Oscars.

On the girl's side of things, Tatum O'Neal at the age of ten and Anna Paquin at the age of eleven are the two youngest to win Best Supporting Actress (Paper Moon and The Piano), and there are four other girls between the ages of ten and eleven between O'Neal and Paquin as nominees: Mary Badham (To Kill a Mockingbird), Quinn Cummings (The Goodbye Girl), Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) and Patty McCormack (The Bad Seed). Patty Duke was sixteen when she won Supporting Actress for The Miracle Worker, the only other winner under twenty in that category. Thirteen-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider) was by far the youngest ever nominee for Best Actress. Children of a Lesser God's Marlee Matlin is the youngest to ever win Best Actress, and she was twenty.

I always thought Leonardo DiCaprio deserved something for What's Eating Gilbert Grape? But he was, at least, nominated.

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Justin Henry - Kramer vs Kramer

best child actor i've ever seen.

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My 100 ALL-TIME FAVE Movies

Alejandro Polanco was really good in Chop Shop (2007)

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This is an easy pick for me.

Ricky Schroder for The Champ (1979) co-starring Jon Voight.