We may never all agree on a winner, but there’s often a sense that the Academy have made a particularly bad call by rewarding a performance that’s bad, mad, or mediocre, while other more obviously worthy contenders go home empty handed.
Read on for a breakdown some of the more controversial or underwhelming acting winners, and tell you which of their rivals we think should have gone home with the gong.
1) Winner: Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady (1964) – Best actor
In George Cukor’s delightful 1964 musical Mr Fair Lady, Rex Harrison reprised his stage role as phonetics scholar Henry Higgins, who takes Audrey Hepburn’s Cockney sparrow under his wing – teaching her to speak proper-like, as part of a wager. Harrison already had the role down pat and does exactly what is expected of him here, bringing charisma and eventual conscience to a terrible snob, but his turn still feels stagey and an unimaginative choice from the Academy. As Hepburn undergoes one of the most memorable ever cinematic evolutions – transforming from feisty flower girl to high society lady – Harrison is very much doing his thing.
Sellers assuming a quartet of roles was part of Kubrick’s funding agreement with Columbia Pictures, much to the director’s initial annoyance, although Slim Pickens eventually replaced Sellers as a Texan aircraft commander, after Sellers sprained his ankle and couldn’t work in the cramped aircraft set.
Who should have won: Linda Blair – The Exorcist
In contrast, her fellow child actress and award rival Linda Blair is on screen for less than half-an-hour in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, but her work is unforgettable. Not only was Blair (who was 15 when she was Oscar nominated) not competing on a remotely level playing field, with far less time to impress, many Oscar voters found The Exorcist distasteful (there was a rumour that veteran filmmaker George Cukor had campaigned against it), and she may have been disadvantaged by that.
3) Winner: Jessica Tandy, Driving Miss Daisy (1989) – Best actress
Who should have won: Michelle Pfeiffer – The Fabulous Baker Boys
Michelle Pfeiffer won a hatful of acting awards for her spunky turn in Steve Kloves's The Fabulous Baker Boys, including a Golden Globe, but the Academy opted to play it safer. Pfeiffer is Susie Diamond, a foul-mouthed former escort who joins forces with the eponymous Baker Boys (played by Jeff and Beau Bridges), a struggling piano duo, with Susie spicing up their dated routines with her breathy singing style, while her provocative presence proves a big draw.
Pfeiffer runs rings around the Bridges brothers with her characterful, fun and multi-shaded performance that’s spiky, sulky and sexy, plus her piano-straddling rendition of Makin' Whoopee has gone down in film history.
4) Winner: Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman (1992) – Best actor
No one could argue that Al Pacino doesn’t deserve to be an Oscar winner, but that his only win is for Martin Brest’s corny, somewhat tedious Scent of a Woman is a crime, given his seminal work in The Godfather franchise, as well as the likes of Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Heat.
Entirely in keeping with the tone of the film he’s in, Denzel Washington is absolutely electric in Spike Lee’s searing, epic and engrossing Malcolm X, which tells the story of the titular civil rights activist, AKA Malcolm Little. It’s a formidable, evolving performance, with Washington taking his protagonist on an extraordinary journey, brilliantly capturing Malcolm’s magnetism, eloquence and persuasiveness as a public speaker. Washington had won best supporting actor for his work in 1989’s Glory, but Malcolm X established him as a Hollywood leading man, as he rises to the task of inhabiting an icon.
5) Winner: Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump (1994) – Best actor
America’s favourite everyman actor, Tom Hanks, spent the ‘80s making us laugh, before re-establishing himself in dramatic roles. In the '90s, he won back-to-back best actor awards, for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, at the 1994 and 1995 ceremonies. Philadelphia was a landmark in the representation of gay characters and Hanks is magnificently moving. Forrest Gump was memorable for different reasons, not least the fact that it made nearly $700 million at the box office.
At the Oscars that year, Hanks triumphed over an actor who had undergone his own reinvention: John Travolta. Travolta’s star had waned in the ‘80s following his ‘70s success in the likes of Grease and Saturday Night Fever. The first two Look Who’s Talking movies had given the actor another taste of commercial success, but in Pulp Fiction Quentin Tarantino helped him get his cool back, and then some.
Playing hitman Vincent Vega, Travolta gives a lovely, largely laid back and instantly iconic performance – the best of his career – which shows off the actor’s considerable screen charm (and dance skills), and contrasts satisfyingly with the more intense work of his partner-in-crime, Samuel L Jackson.
6) Winner: Helen Hunt, As Good As It Gets (1997) – Best actress
Overrated James L Brooks comedy As Good as It Gets is basically a showcase for Jack Nicholson’s exuberantly offensive comic turn (far from the actor’s best work, despite winning him Best actor). However, even the nomination of Hunt (who was best known for sitcom Mad About You) in 1998 doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, let alone that she would win in a field featuring Helena Bonham Carter (The Wings of a Dove), Kate Winslet (Titanic), Julie Christie (Afterglow) and Judi Dench (Mrs Brown). Comedically competent but dramatically less convincing, it’s a mixed bag of a performance that slightly drags the movie down.
Winslet’s work in the too-cheesy Titanic aside, any of the rest of the pack were more deserving, but Dench is the correct pick. The actress would win a year later for her suitably capricious turn as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, despite an absurdly small amount of screen time (under six minutes according to Screen Time Central). However, she would have been a more worthy Oscar winner for her fierce and disarmingly devastated performance as another monarch, the newly grieving Queen Victoria, working her magic alongside comedian Billy Connolly in the charming and witty odd couple drama Mrs Brown.
7) Winner: Roberto Benigni, Life is Beautiful (1997) – Best actor
Although it had some vocal detractors, Italy’s Life is Beautiful was an international sensation, with its co-writer/director and star Roberto Benigni giddily enjoying the adulation (famously climbing across chairs to collect his best foreign language film Oscar at the 1999 ceremony). Set during World War II and inspired by the book In the End, I Beat Hitler by Rubino Romeo Salmonì, the film tells the story of Benigni’s Jewish waiter and bookseller Guido, who is interned in a Nazi concentration camp with his young son, and uses games and outlandish humour to protect him from the horrors.
Benigni’s more deserving rival at the 1999 Oscars was Edward Norton in American History X, a film which considered Nazism from a very different perspective – looking at the long shadow cast by its poisonous ideology and setting its story in contemporary Los Angeles among the white supremacist community. Norton may have been impacted by the furore surrounding the film, which was disowned by its British director Tony Kaye in spectacular style, after the studio and Norton took over the edit, and increased its running time substantially.
Looking past the controversy and some of the film’s flaws, the actor gives an extremely committed and thoroughly credible performance, one that takes his character from a teenager raging impotently, to a ferocious and dangerously charismatic racist, to a reformed and contrite father figure, determined to save his younger brother from a similar fate. It was a launchpad for Norton as a leading man, showing his considerable star quality. The performance earned Norton his second Oscar nomination in quick succession (following his supporting nod for his eye-catching 1996 debut, Primal Fear), and it’s a shame he didn’t win.
8) Winner: Gwyneth Paltrow, Shakespeare in Love (1998) – Best actress
1999’s Best actress category was a 16th century face-off between Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett. The former would win for her role as a wealthy woman who disguises herself as a man in order to perform for Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), before falling for him. Shakespeare in Love is a rather cringingly contrived confection and Paltrow is insipid and off-puttingly earnest. Paltrow’s famously tearful acceptance speech illustrates her own astonishment at winning.
Blanchett would best Paltrow at the Golden Globes and BAFTAs, and it truly beggars belief that she didn’t win the Oscar too, for the first in a two-part performance playing the titular English queen. In Shekhar Kapur’s artfully executed Elizabeth (Elizabeth: The Golden Age would follow in 2007), Blanchett takes the character from a naïve young woman, imprisoned as a threat to monarch Mary I, before being crowned queen herself, and seeing her through political crises, machinations and assassination attempts, to her chilly reinvention as the Virgin Queen. In her rich, complex turn, Blanchett brilliantly conveys Elizabeth’s hardening in a landscape populated by plotters and patronising men, as she grows in confidence and conviction.
9) Winner: Nicole Kidman, The Hours (2002) – Best actress
Nicole Kidman is one of the most daring actresses around, but she always seems to be recognised by the Academy for her less interesting work, with her performances in, say, Babygirl, Birth and To Die For, far more fabulous than her nominated turns in the likes of Moulin Rouge!, Lion and Being the Ricardos. Kidman would win Best actress in 2003 by, or perhaps because of a nose, for her work in Stephen Daldry’s dour drama The Hours. She plays English writer Virginia Woolf out from under the aforementioned false appendage; despite Kidman’s best efforts, it’s an appalling distraction.
Her Hours co-star Julianne Moore should have won instead that year, but not for that film. Moore was up against Kidman for her performance in magnificent, colour-drenched melodrama Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes's Douglas Sirk homage. In this ‘50s-set film, Moore plays much envied but ultimately terribly unhappy housewife, Cathy, who falls for her sensitive and sophisticated Black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), after finding out her husband (Dennis Quaid) is gay. The film is a flamboyantly successful attempt at emulating an earlier era of filmmaking, enhanced by Moore’s perfectly pitched, delicate yet increasingly distressed turn, with her character’s pristine façade unable to hide her heartbreak.
10) Winner: Sean Penn, Mystic River (2003) – Best actor
Sean Penn won the first of his three Oscars in 2004 for his performance in Mystic River. Penn can be prone to histrionics but he can also be a magnetic, can’t-tear-your-eyes-away actor. His Academy Award winning work as Bostonian Jimmy Markum falls into the former camp, and isn’t his best work. In this Clint Eastwood directed adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel, Penn is in OTT tough guy mode as the father of a murdered young woman, who takes the law into his own hands. It’s highly emotional subject matter, but Penn is a man possessed by the desire to steal every scene, and his performance often feels distractingly deliberate, off-kilter and unconvincing.
At the other end of the acting spectrum, Bill Murray’s much gentler, fish-out-of-water work in Lost in Translation, from director Sofia Coppola, made the actor a much more fitting Oscar winner. Riffing on his own persona, Murray plays fading American movie star Bob Harris, who is visiting Japan to promote a brand of whiskey, and struggling to connect to the culture. He does, however, strike up a touching friendship with another out-of-sorts American, Scarlett Johansson’s bored graduate Charlotte. Murray is in deeply melancholic mode, cutting a desperately lonely figure before Charlotte finds him. It’s a poignant, exposing shift for the actor. After years of deadpan, often defensive comedy, it felt like he was finally letting the audience in.
11) Winner: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls (2006) – Best supporting actress
Jennifer Hudson is undeniably a great singer, but Dreamgirls didn’t give her a great platform to establish herself as an actress. Hudson made her screen debut in this musically infectious but narratively uninspired story of a fictional girl group’s rise and fall. Hudson’s vocal theatrics and showmanship do the heavy lifting here. Although she shows potential, her performance can feel underpowered and uncertain, and her inexperience is evident – the contrast between the musical and dramatic scenes make this particularly noticeable. By the time she took on the role of Aretha Franklin in biopic Respect in 2021, Hudson was ready to shine.
Hudson was only 25 when she won her Oscar, triumphing over a much younger, but perhaps more naturally gifted actress, 10-year-old Abigail Breslin. In hilarious comedy drama Little Miss Sunshine, Breslin gives the kind of authentic, unaffected performance that’s all-too-rare for a child performer, especially as kids are so often written as if they’re mini adults. Although undeniably adorable, the rambunctious energy, unselfconscious curiosity and disarming innocence Breslin brings to scenes that deal with very grown-up issues like suicide and depression, acts as a load-lifting counterpoint. Best of all, the young performer holds her own among, and bounces brilliantly off, the elite ensemble, which includes the likes of Toni Collette, Alan Arkin, Steve Carell and Paul Dano.
12) Winner: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side (2009) – Best actress
Telling a true (although since disputed) story in hopelessly sentimental style, The Blind Side stars Sandra Bullock in no-nonsense, all-American mode, with her bossy businesswoman Leigh Anne Tuohy coming across like a wealthy Erin Brockovich (the role was written for Julia Roberts and, boy, does it show). Leigh Anne takes in an impoverished Black teen (Quinton Aaron’s Michael), who has the potential to be an American football star.
By contrast, in Lone Scherfig’s charming, not-too-rose-tinted coming-of-ager An Education, Carey Mulligan proved herself a big screen natural in her first leading film role. Mulligan gives a radiant, open-hearted turn as Jenny, a 16-year-old English schoolgirl, who is seduced by an older man, played by Peter Sarsgaard.
The fresh-faced actress was playing a fair bit younger than she was at the time (she was actually in her mid-20s) but is totally believable, bringing a captivating mix of vulnerability and vivacity, as Jenny is swept up in a romantic adventure, before the scales fall devastatingly from her eyes. Mulligan would lose the Oscar, but this rising star took home BAFTA’s best leading actress prize that year instead.
13) Winner: Christian Bale, The Fighter (2010) – Best supporting actor
One of modern cinema’s most famous method men, Christian Bale doesn’t half throw himself into a role, but sometimes he can unbalance a movie with the intensity of his work. In David O Russell’s true story-based The Fighter, he takes on the supporting role of drug addict Dicky, half-brother of Mark Wahlberg’s rising boxer, Micky Ward, with the actor losing weight and staying in character throughout filming. Wide-eyed and relentlessly animated, Bale captures the jitteriness of addiction, but his performance can be exhausting and although he’s surrounded by a top ensemble – including Wahlberg, Amy Adams and a similarly Oscar winning Melissa Leo – this shameless scene-stealer ensures you’re always watching him.
Hawkes is Ree’s uncle, Teardrop, who defends her against some unsavoury local characters as she tries to track down her missing father and save her home. Even as the character reaches his breaking point, Hawkes gives a much less showy turn than Bale’s in this quietly powerful film, but he’s more fundamentally believable, with this ragged, drowsy and subtly intimidating character wearing the weight of his hard knock-life on his shoulders – you can fully believe he’s seen it all.
14) Winner: Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour (2017) – Best actor
Gary Oldman is an actor who is unafraid to go big, with his work in The Fifth Element, Léon: The Professional and Bram Stoker’s Dracula amongst his more outlandish efforts. He can also be gloriously subtle, as his Oscar nominated turn in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy proved, but he went home empty handed that year.
The Oscar should have gone to Oldman’s fellow Londoner Daniel Kaluuya, whose work in Jordan Peele’s Get Out elevates it from a great horror movie to a modern classic. Kaluuya plays Black photographer Chris Washington who, after spending some time with his girlfriend’s family, realises they are something far more terrifying than the liberal hypocrites they seem.
For a horror film to be truly hair-raising it needs a performance at the centre that makes you really believe what you’re seeing. Running the emotional gamut from amused and bemused, to suspicious and scared absolutely silly, Kaluuya grounds the concept, and it really is all in the actor’s eyes. At least Kaluuya wouldn’t have to wait long to get his hands on an Oscar, winning the Academy Award for best supporting actor in 2021 for his sensational turn in Judas and the Black Messiah.
15) Winner: Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) – Best actor
Rami Malek’s performance was far from the only problem with Bryan Singer’s Freddie Mercury biopic, which took some liberties with the truth and suffered from awful editing and a tendency to sanitise and simplify. And yet Malek (known previously for his Emmy winning work on Mr Robot) gives a memorably dreadful, caricature of a turn as Mercury, all disconcerting dental work, jutted jaw and overly intense eyes. Even in Mercury’s pre-fame scenes, Malek’s performance is self-conscious and almost comically affected, as he fails to give a strong enough sense of the flesh and blood figure behind the showman.
By contrast, in his beautiful remake of A Star Is Born, which he co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in, Bradley Cooper convincingly inhabits the deeply flawed Jackson Maine, a successful country rocker and alcoholic, whose career is now on the wane. Cooper digs deep, with his heartfelt and broodingly bewitching performance working in perfect synchronicity with that of co-star Lady Gaga, who plays Jackson’s love interest and mentee Ally. He generates plenty of sympathy for his character, despite his self-destructive tendencies, and stops winningly short of stealing the show.
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