Reasons why the Academy Awards are meaningless...

Reasons why the Academy Awards are meaningless... Jul 17, 2020 9:44:26 GMT Toasted Cheese and mikef6 like this

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Post by theravenking on Jul 17, 2020 9:44:26 GMT

Jul 16, 2020 20:40:51 GMT mikef6 said:

Jul 16, 2020 13:55:49 GMT theravenking said:

It's always been like this. The academy judges actors not only by the quality of their performances, but also by their public persona and off-screen behaviour.

It's an open secret that Russell Crowe lost out to Denzel Washington in 2002, because of an incident when he threw a phone at a hotel employee.

No one ever let me in on the secret. I have always hated everything about "A Beautiful Mind" including Crowe's performance of fluttery hands and shuffling feet.

What is no secret is that after two African-American actors won the top spots that year, Halle Berry was the other, there was an explosion of racially charged accusations that "politics" and "political correctness" were behind the wins. So many people think that people of color - or in some categories, women - could not possibly win legitimately (or get a job or a promotion) without "political" help. You know, if Russell Crowe had won that year over Denzel, I would have said, "He only won because he was white."

I’m not saying it was the wrong decision. Personally I hated A Beautiful Mind, I thought it was a manipulative Oscar-bait movie with a borderline dumb plot.

But I recall that Crowe was the front runner for best lead actor that year, most people were expecting him to win, and afterwards it was assumed that he had ruined his own chances.

Denzel has always been well-liked and generally respected in Hollywood. He never had any scandals and is also regarded not only as a great actor but also as a decent human being.

How did Christoph Waltz win for Django Unchained? Was his performance really that great? Or is it just that he happened to be a really popular actor at that time?

We can pretend that an actor’s off-screen personality doesn’t matter. But let’s be real you have to be able to play the publicity game and lobby for awards or at least be generally popular and well-liked.

Mickey Rourke never really stood a chance to win best actor for The Wrestler, even if he hadn’t been going up against Sean Penn in Milk, simply because he is Mickey Rourke. People don’t like him, he’s too difficult, too weird, too rude, too intimidating.