It’s been a while since we’ve written about the Oscar race, but as awards season is about to kick off for real with a number of critics groups voting, we’re going to start looking at some of the interesting trends from the past few years and how they apply to this season’s Oscar race. We’re going to start with the supporting actor race and one of the more interesting trends surrounding it is that the Academy seemingly LOVES their bad guys and creating a good villain often leads to a nomination in the supporting actor category.
Of course, whether someone is good or bad is somewhat subjective and some of the best performances have been given by actors who could straddle that line where they do evil things but the audience still ends up loving them.
We’re going to try something a little different this time, so check out the gallery below for a look at some of the actors and performances that have won Oscars following that pattern as well as a few of this year’s performances that follow suit. Scroll over the pictures to read our thoughts on why they won or will get nominated. (Please let us know how you feel about this format as well.)
Oscar Warrior Bad Guys
-
Jared Leto
With this trend in place, one can probably expect Fassbender, Abdi and Bruhl all to receive nominations, making it a far more difficult choice for Oscar voters to decide which villainous portrayal they "enjoy" the most. But there are other factors in the supporting actor race and one of them is the portrayal of a drag queen by Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers' Club (Focus Features), which has enough power due to his transformation that this year's supporting actor Oscar may not go to a film antagonist after all. -
Meryl Streep
Outside of the supporting actor category, even Meryl Streep's cancer-ridden mother, who is constantly haranguing her children in John Wells' adaptation of Tracy Letts' Tony-winning play August Osage County, may be seen as a villain of sorts, although she's likely going for the lead category which puts her at a slight disadvantage, having won that category just a few years back. -
Daniel Bruhl
Another interesting "villain" role is that of Daniel Bruhl's Niki Lauda in Ron Howard's Rush, although in that case, Lauda is a competitive racer with very little charm who goes up against Chris Hemsworth's James Hunt on the Formula 1 circuit. His portrayal of Lauda makes him seem unrepentantly arrogant and not at all likeable, but over the course of the movie, we start seeing his softer side through his marriage and his comeback from a potentially deadly crash is quite inspirational. -
Barkhad Abdi
One of the more interesting performances this year came from Barkhad Abdi's portrayal of a Somali pirate in Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips. Sure, everyone is talking about Tom Hanks' performance, but there's no denying that Abdi, a first-time actor, not only holds his own against the Oscar-winning actor but is actually able to humanize the Somali pirate he plays so you understand his motivations. -
Michael Fassbender
This year is interesting because we do have a number of actors who fall into this category of being antagonists, villains or whatever you want to call them, and they're some of the more memorable performances of the years. That's certainly the case with Michael Fassbender in Steve McQueen's acclaimed 12 Years a Slave, playing irredeemably drunken slave owner Edwin Epps, whose tortures of Chiwetel Ejiofor's Solomon Northup and the other slaves is so despicable, that it's a drastic departure from the lead roles Fassbender played in McQueen's last two films as well. -
Joe Pesci & Tommy Lee Jones
Going back a bit further, what person who has seen Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas doesn't come out of that with a takeaway of what a bastard Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito is even amongst his gangster friends. A few years after Pesci won an Oscar for the role, Tommy Lee Jones won his Oscar playing the FBI agent chasing Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, another example of how a mainstream studio movie could still be considered Oscar-worthy. -
Christoph Waltz
Most Americans (and Oscar voters) were introduced to Austria's Christoph Waltz via Quentin Tarantino's war movie Inglourious Basterds in which he played Colonel Hans Landa, a sadistic Nazi who we see killing a family of Jews and generally being evil while always smiling. Waltz won the Oscar that year with relative ease and then returned for Tarantino's next movie, Django Unchained, as more of a protagonist, winning his second Oscar just three years later. -
Javier Bardem
Another great example of cinematic villainy deserving of Oscar gold is Javier Bardem's assassin Anton Chigurh from the Coen Brothers' Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, a character we meet as he begins a murder spree of innocent bystanders. Like many Coen Brothers' characters, he's quite enigmatic in his actions, as he kills a lot of people over the course of the movie while chasing after Josh Brolin's character. -
Heath Ledger
The most immediate example of the trend we mentioned is the posthumous Oscar won by Heath Ledger for his portrayal of Batman villain The Joker in Christopher Nolan's sequel The Dark Knight. While the movie made a boatload of money, it was sadly neglected for any nominations beyond technical ones, but Ledger winning an Oscar for his performance proved that the Academy isn't entirely blinded to the bigger summer blockbusters.
