All five of these performers have been Oscar nominated before, two of them already have Academy Awards at home.
Denzel Washington’s nomination for
The Tragedy of Macbeth is his ninth acting nod, and he has the two wins for
Training Day (Best Actor) and
Glory (Best Supporting Actor). Those nine nominations tie him with legends Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and Spencer Tracy. The only male actors with more nominations are Larry Olivier’s ten and Jack Nicholson’s twelve (and Meryl Streep has the most with a god-like twenty-one!). There have been six previous Best Actor nominations for playing a Shakespeare character, and his is the first cinematic Macbeth to make it. The others were Kenneth Branagh as
Henry V (Day-Lewis won for
My Left Foot), Marlon Brando’s Marc Anthony in
Julius Caesar (William Holden won for
Stalag 17), and then four Laurence Olivier performances as
Othello (Lee Marvin won for
Cat Ballou),
Richard III (Yul Brenner won for
The King & I),
Henry V (Fredric March won for
The Best Years of Our Lives), and his self-directed Best Picture winning turn as
Hamlet (Olivier did win Best Actor). If Denzel were to match Olivier’s Shakesperian win here that would put him in rarefied company as only six performers have ever won three acting Oscars in a career: Walter Brennan, Ingrid Bergman, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Frances McDormand. And Kate Hepburn stands above everyone with four. Washington may well get to four or even five wins by the time all is said and done, but as good a turn as it is I don’t believe his Macbeth is going to get him any closer to that record.
This is
Javier Bardem’s fourth nom, this time for his Desi Arnez in
Being the Ricardos. He had previous Best Actor nominations for Julian Schnabel’s
Before Night Falls (Russell Crowe won for
Gladiator) and Iñárritu’s
Biutiful (Colin Firth won for
The King’s Speech) and Javier won Best Supporting Actor for his indelible, coin-flipping, killing machine Anton Chigurh in The Coen Bros.'
No Country for Old Men. The Spaniard does fine playing the famous Cuban actor/musician/executive/husband for Aaron Sorkin’s look at a week behind-the-scenes of
"I Love Lucy", though I doubt anyone would rank it as one of his handful of greatest performances. Last year he was also Stilgar in Villeneuve’s Best Picture nominated
Dune. Bardem may get a second Oscar in his career but it won’t be for Ricky Ricardo. Bardem is one half of two real-life couples both enjoying nominations this year. His wife Penélope Cruz is nominated for
Parallel Mothers while
The Power of the Dog’s Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons pulled off the feat in the same project.
Andrew Garfield’s nomination for
tick, tick…BOOM!, adapted from the stage for the screen by Lin Manuel-Mirand, is the second of his career following his recognition for
Hacksaw Ridge. Casey Affleck won that year for
Manchester by the Sea, despite Garfield having also starred in Scorsese’s
Silence that year. This year his
Eyes of Tammy Faye co-star Jessica Chastain may win Best Actress and I believe he was also one of several
Spider-Men, but despite that banner year he will be an also-ran once again. At only thirty-eight he will almost surely be back in the future, or at least in a multiverse version of the Oscars. A few Best Actor winners have come from Musicals: Yul Brenner (
The King & I), Rex Harrison (
My Fair Lady), and Bing Crosby (
Going My Way). Additionally James Cagney (
Yankee Doodle Dandy), Jamie Foxx (
Ray), and Rami Malek (
Bohemian Rhapsody) won for biopics of real musicians while Robert Duvall (
Tender Mercies) and Jeff Bridges (
Crazy Heart) won for dramas about fictional musicians.
Benedict Cumberbatch’s emotionally schizophrenic and often quietly menacing performance is the center of
The Power of the Dog. This year also found him zapping around with the three
Spider-Men as Doctor Strange and starring in another Netflix project in
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. He has only one previous Oscar nomination as Alan Turing in
The Imitation Game, which was the year Eddie Redmayne won for
The Theory of Everything. Cumberbatch may well be destined to win an Oscar one of these days, but I don’t suspect it will be for
The Power of the Dog. Even if it does take Best Director and possibly Best Picture.
Will Smith has already won the Golden Globe and the SAG Award for playing
King Richard Williams, the sometimes seemingly pathologically driven man who had a very detailed plan to make tennis superstars from two of his daughters Venus & Serena. Will Smith, despite being one of the most famous and generally well-liked personalities in Hollywood, has never won an Oscar. Plenty of movie star love and moolah, but not Oscar gold. His two previous nominations were as Michael Mann’s
Ali the year Denzel Washington won for
Training Day and as another driven, real-life character Chris Gardener in
The Pursuit of Happyness which was the year Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin won for
The Last King of Scotland. From his Grammy-winning music career to
"The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" to
Six Degrees of Separation and then
Independence Day, Men in Black, the
Bad Boys franchise, and all the rest he has proven to be as bankable as he is likeable. Unlike Will, his character in
King Richard is not always the most likeable, but that work coupled with a lifetime of goodwill is about to make him an Oscar winner as Best Actor. If he wins he will join Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, and Jamie Foxx as the only African-Americans to win in this category.
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