The first time that a deceased person was nominated for an Academy Award was in 1929, the very first year of the ceremony. Poor Gerald Duffy, who wrote the titles for the silent film “The Private Life of Helen of Troy,” had died the previous June. Not only was Duffy gone but his profession was dying, too—talkies had arrived, and the award for Best Title Writing (won by Joseph Farnham) was discontinued the next year. It wasn’t until 1940 that an Oscar was won posthumously, by Sidney Howard, the screenwriter of “Gone with the Wind.” Over the decades, this group has come to include Peter Finch (“Network”), the lyricist Howard Ashman (“Beauty and the Beast”), and Heath Ledger (“The Dark Knight”). It’s all but certain that Chadwick Boseman will join their ranks, on April 25th, for his incandescent performance in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
Boseman’s death, in August, has cast a tragic pall over this year’s Best Actor race, while also rendering the competition all but moot. The supporting-actor category, meanwhile, is more fraught. Daniel Kaluuya might have been a shoo-in, for his fiery turn as Fred Hampton in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” were it not for an unexpected twist: the actors’ branch nominated his co-star, LaKeith Stanfield, in the same category. It’s not unusual for castmates to face off—last year, it was Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, from “The Irishman”—and the effect is often to split the vote. What was surprising, this year, is that Stanfield, who plays the F.B.I. informant William O’Neal, is plainly the film’s protagonist, and its producers positioned him for the Best Actor race. Even having both men considered leads would have made more sense—they both play title characters, after all. Stanfield doesn’t lack for star power, but would a bigger name have wound up in the lead-actor race? Is there some unconscious racial bias at work? Or is it just weird Academy math? Whatever the reason, the matchup has given Oscar prognosticators something to puzzle over, and may create an opening for, of all people, Sacha Baron Cohen. Below, a look at both actor races.
BEST ACTOR
Riz Ahmed, “Sound of Metal”
The thirty-eight-year-old Ahmed is a multi-hyphenate talent: he’s acted in “Nightcrawler” and “The Night Of”; released hip-hop albums as a solo artist and as part of the duo Swet Shop Boys; and performed “The Long Goodbye,” his musical breakup album with his native England, as a one-man show. He’s now the first Muslim nominated for Best Actor. In Darius Marder’s film, he plays Ruben, a heavy-metal drummer and recovering addict who loses his hearing in a terrifying swoop, as if plunged underwater, and must learn how to live a new life. Ahmed’s Ruben is less panicked than restless: his eyes stay wide but steady, even as Ruben’s navigation of the world is utterly scrambled. He’s a man besieged by silence who can’t find a moment of quiet within.
Chadwick Boseman, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”
In 2016, two years before he played the title role in “Black Panther,” Boseman received a diagnosis of Stage III colon cancer. He kept his illness private, even as his fame went global and he became an icon of Black heroism. All that would have made his death, at the age of forty-three, a shattering cultural event. But, by happenstance of fate, his crowning dramatic performance was released after he was gone, a final grace note on a truncated career. As Levee, a cocky Jazz Age trumpeter with big dreams and a hair-trigger temper, Boseman delivers August Wilson’s arias of self-implosion with mesmerizing finesse. Knowing that his mortality was closing in offscreen only lends this bravura turn more weight. His performance is, more than anything, alive.
Anthony Hopkins, “The Father”
It feels as if half a decade has passed since Hopkins’s most recent Oscar nomination, for “The Two Popes.” But, no, that was last year. Time and its ravages are at the center of Florian Zeller’s film, in which Hopkins, now eighty-three, plays a man at war with his own deteriorating mind. The character, also named Anthony, is an irascible sort, but a late scene in which he regresses into childhood ranks alongside the peaks of Hopkins’s long film career. His six Oscar-nominated roles include the likes of John Quincy Adams, Richard Nixon, and Pope Benedict XVI, but his turn in “The Father,” as a King Lear whose kingdom is a humble London apartment, is among his greatest. So what if he insists that no acting was required?
Gary Oldman, “Mank”
Oldman won this award three years ago, playing Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour,” and here he plays a warrior of a different sort. As the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, Oldman spends much of David Fincher’s film bedridden and sozzled, somehow churning out the screenplay for “Citizen Kane.” His most indelible scene comes late, when Mankiewicz, in a flashback, crashes a dinner party at the Hearst Castle and slurs his way through an indictment of the well-heeled guests. There’s probably no shorter route to winning an Oscar than playing a real-life luminary—an Oscar winner, no less!—but Oldman’s casting has struck an odd, even off-putting, note, in part because the Mankiewicz of the film was two or three decades younger than Oldman.
Steven Yeun, “Minari”
Yeun was born in Seoul and came to Saskatchewan with his family when he was a child. As an adult, he moved to Los Angeles and found overnight fame in the zombie series “The Walking Dead.” It’s an immigrant story that’s both common and extraordinary: the American dream meets the Hollywood myth. In Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical drama, Yeun enacts a more representative version of what it takes to claim your own little patch of America. He plays Jacob, based on Chung’s father, a hardworking patriarch who starts a farm in Arkansas. Yeun shows Jacob’s sweat and sacrifice, but also his stubbornness and folly—a lived-in portrait of someone else’s father, rendered with movie-star charisma.
Bottom line: If there were any doubt of Boseman’s win, it was erased by his widow’s gutting speech at the Golden Globes. Rarely is there a vote-your-heart choice so obvious—and so deserved. In another year, Hopkins’s late-career tour de force would stand a good chance. As for Ahmed and Yeun, there’s no denying their arrival as formidable leading men of color, so let’s hope that Hollywood doesn’t fail to give them more roles worthy of their talents.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Sacha Baron Cohen, “The Trial of the Chicago 7”
Aaron Sorkin’s film is a true ensemble piece, and any number of its male stars (were there any women in the movie?) could have filled this category: Frank Langella, as a befuddled but contemptible Judge Julius Hoffman; Michael Keaton, as a coolly authoritative Ramsey Clark; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, as a defiant Bobby Seale; and the list goes on. So why Cohen? For one thing, in 2020 he also gave us “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” a much-needed sequel to close out the Trump era. For another, he plays Abbie Hoffman, the Yippie activist who was, like Cohen, a scene stealer and a prankster who laughed at emperors with no clothes. Perhaps more than anyone else could, Cohen showed what made Hoffman both heroic and annoying.
Daniel Kaluuya, “Judas and the Black Messiah”
It’s been four years since most moviegoers were introduced to Kaluuya, as the mild-mannered boyfriend who gets banished to the Sunken Place, in “Get Out.” As Fred Hampton, the redoubtable chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, in the late sixties, Kaluuya is neither mild nor mannered: his speechifying is blunt, electrifying, and, true to the title, messianic. Kaluuya captures Hampton the performer, someone who could suavely lead an army into battle, but he also has some nice, intimate moments with Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), Hampton’s girlfriend and fellow-revolutionary. It’s a performance full of strength and self-assurance, the perfect foil to Stanfield’s double-crossing William O’Neal.
LaKeith Stanfield, “Judas and the Black Messiah”
