Reflections on This Year's Oscars From A TV Critic Part 1: Why Wasn't The Race for Best Actor Over In April?

 

 

This article requires a bit of introduction for those of you who might not know how voters pick winners in the Emmys.

At the end of each season everyone in the cast of a show, whether it is a drama, comedy or limited series, picks a single episode that they believe represents their best work and submit it to every single awards show from the Golden Globes to the Emmys. I don't know how that would work if multiple nominees from the same show are competing against each other. For example when someone was looking at the episode Kieran Culkin submitted for Best Actor for Succession in 2023 did they solely focus on Culkin or did they also focus on Jeremy Strong's presence in that episode when it came to making their decision? Some day I may write on that ambiguity but this isn't the time because I want to focus on how I judge a performance for the Emmys.

My approach, which I imagine is similar to the majority of viewers even if they aren't critics, is to look at a performers entire body of work during a season even episodes they have a smaller role in. When I was watching Better Call Saul I wasn't going to judge Jonathan Banks work in every episode, Rhea Seehorn's, Bob Odenkirk's and so on. I made similar judgments when I was looking at that for every nominee in every category I've seen.

For that reason I've always given what you might call a 'degree of difficulty bonus' if during the course of a season we learn something about a character which adds a completely new layer to their performance that makes us call into question everything we previously believed about them. The obvious example would be Lost and such brilliant performances by Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson. The entire cast was extraordinary, of course, but the two of them were playing variations on who they really were to the rest of the characters but at such a level that we believed it was genuine.  This was true for Emerson from the moment we met him as Henry Gale and if you watched the fifth season of Lost you know that by the end of the season we learn the man we have thought was John Locke for the second half of the year is not who he said he was.

These kinds of performances within performances are rare even in the era of Peak TV but I've seen the majority of them. There was Gregory Itzin's work as President Charles Logan on Day Five of 24, Damien Lewis's work as Nick Brody in the first season of Homeland, Giancarlo Esposito's work as Gustavo Fring on Breaking Bad (that layer is largely absent in Better Call Saul but it shows up quite a few times) Martin Short's performance as Leonard Winstone in Season 3 of Damages, Christian Slater in Mr. Robot (especially in the first season) and Yahya Abdul-Mahteen's work in Watchmen. I realized I've left women out in this recounting so here are some clear ones: Evan Rachel Wood and Thandiwe Newton in Westworld, everyone in the cast of Severance (obviously), Kathy Bates's work in Matlock and Julia Roberts work in Season One of Homecoming. And that's without counting the entire run of Dexter, both Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell's work in The Americans and Jon Hamm's work in Mad Men. I'm sure there are countless others I've forgotten but let's not let the list get endless.

The overwhelming majority of these performances were either nominated for Emmys or won them. In my opinion many of them are among the all-time great character works in 21^st century TV and I don't think I'd get that much pushback for saying so.  That brings me to last night's Oscars.

Now I'm not going to engage in the debate over whether Sinners deserved to be Best Picture more than One Battle After Another because I don't care enough about the Oscars. What I do want to make an argument for is something that became clear to me the first time I saw Sinners on cable in August.  After I saw the film the first time and have watched it multiple times well before even the nominations came out, there was only one question in my mind: which of the four other nominees will end up getting trounced by Michael B. Jordan at the Oscars?

I have to say I was genuinely pissed as the awards seasons went on and every major award group right up until the Actors on March 1^st seemed determined to crown Timothee Chalamet or Wagner Moura the next winner. I had much admiration for the work Leonardo DiCaprio did in One battle After Another but the longer the awards seasons went I was beginning to wonder what the hell was going on.

Now I realize most of you don't pay attention to all of the Film Critics Groups that meet in December and January: by this point I'm beginning to think that they're beginning to breed like rabbits even as films themselves begin to struggle. I'll save you the trouble. Jordan managed to win the Best Actor prize from twelve of those groups; Chalamet won 17 for Marty Supreme, Leonardo DiCaprio won 6, and Ethan Hawke won seven for Blue Moon. That part didn't bother me; I know that unless a performance is absolutely extraordinary there will never be universal agreement from the critics on who will win any major acting award and some critics groups will give awards to actors who I know won't get there or if they do for a different film. Case in point Sebastian Stan won multiple awards last year for A Different Man but got nominated for The Apprentice. (No comment.)

So when the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice gave their Best Actor prizes to Timothee Chalamet and were shutting Jordan out, I began to wonder what was going on. Now I need to be clear, race did not enter my discussion at any point as to why. What I was wondering was why that degree of difficulty bonus – which critics and especially Academy voters really tend to lock on to – didn't seem to be working for Jordan when by their own rules, it applied.

Now as everyone who has seen the film and even those of who haven't know Jordan played twin brothers nicknamed Smoke and Stack. So he was giving two performances in Sinners.  No, I take that back. He was actually giving three.

What cemented for me the certainty Jordan should have won was when Stack became a vampire. (I really don't think I'm spoiling anything at this point.) As anyone who knows the first thing about this and as the film's own dialogue explain, a vampire is completely different version of the human it once was. So Jordan had to play:

Stack pretending he was still Stack

Stack as an undead monster

And he had to make that change believable in less than a minute of screen time.

I don't care how method Chalamet went to play Marty, either onscreen or when he was campaigning to get the movie seen.  Jordan had to play two versions of one character and then play his brother reacting to learning the truth that his brother is dead and gone forever.  That scene alone should have ended the discussion of who Best Actor was right then. The fact that it didn't – and more importantly that so many people seemed determined to give the award to either Chalamet or Wagner Moura during January was insulting.

To be clear its not like the Oscars weren't unwilling to give nominations to performers whose roles themselves were performances. We saw Emma Stone get multiple nominations for her work in Bugonia which not until the final minutes do we realize that this is an entirely different kind of performance. And the Oscars were more than willing to honor Amy Madigan for her work in the horror masterpiece Weapons for her work as Aunt Gladys, a performance that became iconic even quicker than Jordan's in Sinners. (On a welcome note the 2026 Oscars were among their many other accomplishments the best year that horror as had collectively in its history.) So the question is why did it take until the Actor Awards two weeks ago for the rest of Hollywood to realize, yes, Michael B. Jordan was the Best Actor in a Leading Role?

The go-to answer is race but it was harder to make that obvious call as the awards season went on. Teanna Taylor won Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes a week after Madigan had won the Critics Choice Awards in that category and Wagner Moura did prevail for Best Actor in a Drama for The Secret Agent. (Let's just work around the fact Sinners and One Battle After Another were in the Comedy/Musical category.) And its not like the vibes weren't shifting. The BAFTAs did give Best Supporting Actress to Wunmi Mosaku who was basically empty handed to that both in the red carpet season.

The other explanation is the Oscars has never truly been able to deal with performances that involve these kinds of lifting unless it comes in the form of Peter Sellers. They were unwilling to nominate Armie Hammer for his work as The Winklevoss Twins in The Social Network any more then they would Eddie Murphy for The Nutty Professor and they couldn't bring themselves to nominate Alec Guinness for his work in Kind Hearts & Coronets. They will make these accommodations in the works of Charlie Kaufmann – they've nominated Nicholas Cage and Kate Winslet for playing these kinds of roles in Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine – but it doesn't fit the 'mold' that the Oscars tend to give for performances. Their degree of difficulty, sadly, has far too often been seen in how they give awards for actors who play autistic characters or with some form of physical disability (satirized so well in Tropic Thunder) wear extensive levels of padding and makeup (Brendan Frasier in The Whale is the most recent example of that) and of course versions of historical characters. (Unless you count Jesse Buckley's work in Hamnet we actually didn't have that many of them among this year's nominees.)

TV has had very few of those from category one in the last quarter of a century (and when they do appear their increasingly played by actors who actually have them), has more than a few characters with makeup and CGI but rarely gives them the awards, and while we'll always have period pieces and historical series (The Crown is the most awarded of the group) they've always been far less omnipresent then they are at the Oscars every year. I don't pretend the Emmys are based more on merit then the Oscars are (though I'll gladly put their track record in this century against the Oscars any day of the week and expect to come out ahead) but they certainly recognize that degree of nuance more. And it isn't lost on me that Jordan, long before he became one of the biggest box office stars in this century, cut his teeth working in some of the greatest TV shows of all time. (That's actually going to be the subject of a future article.) When you cut your teeth working for David Simon and then become a featured player in the work of Jason Katims you learn subtlety and nuance in a way that film has increasingly become far less capable of delivering.

All of which is to say that the Oscars did the right thing and gave Best Actor to the best performance by anyone in that category this year. I'm happy for Jordan and I'm delighted he won. As a critic an observer I'm  slightly irritated that it took so long for everyone in my circle to realize what for me was obvious six months ago. Do better, guys. Do better.