Happened to read this piece about "10 actors who won Oscars for the wrong movie". I know this is the sort of lightweight list thingie you’re supposed to just glance though and not analyse (and it was probably written to a brief because of the Leo DiCaprio hullabaloo this year), but being in a nitpicking mood I was amused by the contemporary-film bias on view here. (By “contemporary film" I mean pretty much anything from the 1970s onward.) Not such a big issue overall, but look at this patronising bit in the entry for Henry Fonda:
1) Brando-like “realism” is the main standard to aspire to (I’ll leave poor James Dean out of this - doesn’t seem fair to compare his truncated career with that of heavyweights like Fonda and Brando)
Very dubious assertion, to put it politely. Also, perceptions of realism are massively subjective and change with each decade: a case can be made that the best work of old-school actors like John Wayne and Gary Cooper now looks more natural than Brando’s showy understatement in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront (even though one can see why his performances were so energising and zeitgeist-defining in the early 50s).
2) This "realism”, which is so appealing to “the modern eye”, automatically makes Fonda’s Tom Joad his best performance
(I wonder what the writer would feel about his pratfall-and-double-take-filled turn as the dopey comic foil in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a film that was gloriously unconcerned with being “real” in the Grapes of Wrath sense.)
3) The actual best actor winner for 1940 is now practically forgotten
Um, no, not if you know anything about old cinema. That winner was James Stewart as the reporter in The Philadelphia Story - a super performance in an all-time classic. (Pssst: I thought Cary Grant in the same film was even better - and predictably he wasn’t even nominated - but that’s another debate.)
Speaking of which, Stewart himself should have been a frontrunner on this list, because most people felt his win for a second-lead role in The Philadelphia Story was intended as compensation for not winning for Mr Smith Goes to Washington the previous year. But it’s all about the “modern eye”…
As far as performances of the time go, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad rivals the best of Brando and Dean, with 'Grapes of Wrath' acting as a cornerstone for realism in cinema and novel adaptations, the idea that Henry was robbed of the award when the winner that year’s performance has all but faded into distant memory seems shocking in the modern eye.From this, one may gather that:
1) Brando-like “realism” is the main standard to aspire to (I’ll leave poor James Dean out of this - doesn’t seem fair to compare his truncated career with that of heavyweights like Fonda and Brando)
Very dubious assertion, to put it politely. Also, perceptions of realism are massively subjective and change with each decade: a case can be made that the best work of old-school actors like John Wayne and Gary Cooper now looks more natural than Brando’s showy understatement in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront (even though one can see why his performances were so energising and zeitgeist-defining in the early 50s).
2) This "realism”, which is so appealing to “the modern eye”, automatically makes Fonda’s Tom Joad his best performance
(I wonder what the writer would feel about his pratfall-and-double-take-filled turn as the dopey comic foil in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a film that was gloriously unconcerned with being “real” in the Grapes of Wrath sense.)
3) The actual best actor winner for 1940 is now practically forgotten
Um, no, not if you know anything about old cinema. That winner was James Stewart as the reporter in The Philadelphia Story - a super performance in an all-time classic. (Pssst: I thought Cary Grant in the same film was even better - and predictably he wasn’t even nominated - but that’s another debate.)
Speaking of which, Stewart himself should have been a frontrunner on this list, because most people felt his win for a second-lead role in The Philadelphia Story was intended as compensation for not winning for Mr Smith Goes to Washington the previous year. But it’s all about the “modern eye”…
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