Broadly speaking, the best way to get an acting Oscar is to play someone lovable, or someone lovably hateable. Not every acting winner fits that binary, of course, but the history of all four categories is filled with fascinatingly bad behavior (Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, JK Simmons in Whiplash) as well as expressions of sheer delight at the combination of actor and lovable character (Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love). This year’s crop of acting nominees isn’t exactly short of rooting interests: Michael B Jordan makes his pair of 1930s gangsters charming twice over in Sinners while still distinguishing between their individual nuances, and Benicio del Toro’s even-keeled activist is highly lovable in One Battle After Another. Elsewhere, though, there’s definitely a stronger-than-usual strain of characters who defy the usual standards of easy likability.
The importance of likability in an Oscar campaign is akin to its importance in a political one – though in the case of the Academy awards, performers are campaigning twice, for themselves as actors and, essentially, for their characters as part of the cinematic firmament. That’s why likability is arguably the secret accelerant to the longtime trend of the awards going to actors playing real-life figures. It’s not just about a physical transformation or seamless impersonation, because many of those biographical performance aren’t really that when you put them side by side with the real thing. It’s that extra rooting interest that comes from embodying Freddie Mercury, Winston Churchill, Stephen Hawking, Abraham Lincoln, Judy Garland – people who Academy voters probably already like or admire to some degree, at least in the abstract. Suffering, too, can help create an easier sense of empathy.
As with so many things, the men have more leeway. The two most recent winners, Adrien Brody for The Brutalist and Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer, play characters who do plenty of bad stuff and don’t exactly scan as heroic or cuddly. (Purely on those grounds, Brody would have lost to Colman Domingo in Sing Sing, and Murphy to Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers.) But they’re also ultimately more sympathetic than not, as the tides of history carry them forward. Over in the best actress category, meanwhile, it’s more pronounced that recent history favors the usual group of real-life figures (Meryl Streep in The Iron lady, Jessica Chastain in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Renée Zellweger in Judy), ingenues (Jennifer Lawrence, Brie Larson, Mikey Madison, Emma Stone – twice!), underdogs (Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once) and Frances McDormand, who in her most recent two wins makes rendering potentially “difficult” characters enormously likable – that’s kind of her whole thing.
So it’s a jolt to look at this year’s nominees and see that Academy fave Stone made it in for Bugonia, where she plays a chilly CEO attempting to talk her way out of a kidnapping by a fanatic who believes she’s an alien. Her general predicament generates some baseline sympathy – which the movie actively works to undermine both beforehand, by calling upon her ace satirical instincts as an insufferable corporate girlboss, and in the movie’s finale as, well, I won’t spoil it, but it’s not endearing stuff! And Stone might still resemble a plucky heroine compared with Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a movie that presses on the bruises of motherhood by taking a character who should automatically generate sympathy (as a caregiver to a sick child) and making sure she always winds up making what feels like the wrong decision.
Mary Bronstein’s film has a spiritual companion over in best actor, where Marty Supreme (co-written by Bronstein’s husband) puts its young hero through a similar gauntlet of bad luck and self-destructive choices. Timothée Chalamet seems closer than ever to actually winning his obviously coveted best actor Oscar, all while inspiring debate over whether his character is too noxious to put up with. He is accompanied by the similarly wheedling (if wittier) Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) in Blue Moon, an artist biopic that seems to delight in refusing to glorify its subject with the same fervor as virtually every other Oscar-nominated example. Over in the supporting categories, Stellan Skarsgård makes such a chilly, selfish dad character in Sentimental Value that even after he reconciles with his adult kids, he doesn’t really register as having changed all that much. And Teyana Taylor’s steely charisma is intentionally complicated in One Battle After Another by having her revolutionary character betray her comrades – and leave her infant child. Even the traditional villainy of Amy Madigan in Weapons doesn’t register as charismatic evil, like Hannibal Lecter; her witchy Aunt Gladys is thoroughly off-putting.
Again, not everyone is so difficult; this year still has Kate Hudson from Song Sung Blue, an almost annoyingly ingratiating performance (and another real-life figure, albeit not a famous one), and Delroy Lindo, whose Sinners character’s alcoholism is poignant rather than a dealbreaker. Jessie Buckley seems highly likely to win best actress for playing Agnes Shakespeare – though even her suffering through the death of a child is a little pricklier than most. Still, the shadow of likability (and the love-to-hate villainy, which is really just a different form of likability) doesn’t loom as large over this year’s crop of nominated actors.
Does this indicate a broader weariness with either outright villainy or unvarnished heroism? Though “difficult” and hard-to-like characters might reflect a desire for real-world nuance, it’s not as if that real world has seemed particularly short on outright villains in recent history. (That probably helps to explain the Oscar presence of Sean Penn’s Steven Lockjaw from One Battle After Another; on one hand, he’s a cartoonish villain, but on the other, is he all that hard to believe?) Given how general audiences seem less in thrall to particular stars than ever, it could be read as a long-overdue unbundling of recognizability and actor-flattering likability. Two of the year’s most famous and frequently recognized nominees are Stone and Leonardo DiCaprio, selected for performances that actively undermine their radiant charms in ways that are both comic and, especially in DiCaprio’s case, poignant. In an older version of Hollywood, they’d probably be starring in an age-gap-ignoring romance together.
On the other hand, the less likable character can inspire a different form of high-wire egotism, allowing a performer like Chalamet to show off just how much he can do without bending to the traditions of cinematic heroism. How brave, to be so talented and good-looking and do such bad things on screen! Most Oscar performances can be rescanned as some kind of careerist calculation. Still, it’s hard not to look at this trend as freeing on some level, if for no other reason than this year’s group of nominees is especially strong: no hammy impressions, no de facto lifetime achievement awards, virtually embarrassment-free. This batch of unlikable characters are also performances that are weirdly easy to love.
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