Best performance, or best narrative?
Every year, the Academy Awards aim to highlight the best that film has to offer, whether it be acting performances or technical innovations. Industry insiders and general audiences alike passionately campaign for their favorite actors and actresses, hoping their favorites receive a golden statuette.
In theory, the system is a democratic one: whoever gets the most votes in a category wins (except for the Academy Award for Best Picture, which votes via a preferential ballot that ranks all ten films). People are told to vote on the “best” performance of the year, one that truly showcases the craft of acting. This year, the frontrunners in their respective categories seem to be Adrien Brody in The Brutalist (who’s making a film comeback since his 2003 Best Actor win in The Pianist), Demi Moore for The Substance (a veteran who won her first lead actress industry award with the Golden Globe), Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain (an underrated actor that rose to prominence thanks to Succession), and Zoe Saldaña for Emilia Pérez (another veteran actress of Avatar, Marvel, and Star Trek fame).
No matter if you are rooting for these individuals or their competitors—like Ariana Grande, Mikey Madison, or Timotheé Chalamet—a curious commonality appears to justify their award viability. For some reason or another, they deserve it because they’ve been solid actors in the industry for years, even decades, before they gave the actual performance they were nominated for. For an award that’s meant to award the best performance of the year, how much should an actor’s background and narrative play into their win, if at all?
On the one hand, the Oscars are no stranger to awarding actors and actresses long overdue for a win, typically as consolation prizes for previous slights. A few examples thrown around in the conversation of “career wins” include Judi Dench for Shakespeare In Love, Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant, and Julianne Moore for Still Alice. When Jamie Lee Curtis won in 2023 for Best Supporting Actress, besting the category–favorite Angela Bassett for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, people accused Curtis’ win of being a win for her decades–long career rather than her 17–minute performance in that year’s Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All At Once.
It’s not that these winners aren’t deserving of the prizes, but their wins often come from films that are much weaker than their strongest performances. Judi Dench’s best work prior to her Best Supporting Actress win was in Mrs. Brown (and later the much–lauded Notes on a Scandal), but the voters instead offered their flowers for what was practically a five–minute cameo in the infamous Harvey Weinstein–backed Shakespeare in Love. The same is said with DiCaprio (who lost for films like The Aviator and The Wolf on Wall Street) and Julianne Moore (who arguably had much better films in her filmography). In all these cases, the general sentiment was that it was simply the “right time” to award the actors for continuously doing amazing work throughout their careers, even if they were awarded for a less–than–stellar performance.
The Oscar voting body, however, isn’t the most consistent in their reasoning. In a case like Curtis, she was competing with another compelling narrative: Bassett hadn’t been nominated for an Oscar since 1994 for her iconic role in What's Love Got to Do with It, nor had she ever won before receiving an honorary award in 2024, a year after she lost to Curtis. Bassett, too, worked decades as a solid actress and a trailblazer for Black voices in the industry. Curtis prevailed thanks to a rousing speech at the Screen Actor Guilds Awards before Oscar voting closed, and the understanding was that Curtis was a beloved figure in the horror genre who never had a vehicle to be recognized by an awards body like the Oscars (the Academy doesn’t like to step into horror often). Yet ironically, it could be argued that neither of the two had the best performance of the year in the category, with many preferring Curtis’ co–star Stephanie Hsu, or even the underrated Kerry Condon from The Banshees of Inisherin. Should both of these facts undermine Curtis’ triumphant win?
And what about the times when a narrative falters? When Lily Gladstone lost to Emma Stone in the Best Actress category in 2024, people were disappointed that Gladstone didn’t get the highest honor bestowed to actors and lost the opportunity to make history as the first Indigenous winner in the category. Gladstone had a compelling backstory: she was a powerful voice and representative of Native Americans, and her win would’ve been a powerful antithesis of the film she starred in, Killers of the Flower Moon. After all, Michelle Yeoh won Best Actress in 2023, becoming the first Asian woman to win and only the second woman of color. Was Stone, who acted phenomenally in the absurdist Poor Things, actually less deserving than Gladstone, given that she won already for La La Land?
Looking back at this year’s awards, we once again have multiple narratives butting heads: Demi Moore, the “popcorn actress” that gave the defining performance of her career; Fernanda Torres, the second Brazilian actress to be nominated for Best Actress after her own mother, Fernanda Montenegro; and Timotheé Chalamet, a rising prodigy who has starred in seven Best Picture films in the past decade. It seems like everyone has a story driving fans and supporters to advocate for them to win the gold. Where does the line blur between passion for the performance and passion for the artist?
To be frank, I do not have an answer to any of these questions. Awards are always subjective, and one’s tastes in media cannot always align with the general consensus. How does one single out the definitive best performance of the year, especially in a year so packed with talent? There will always be people complaining that someone is undeserving, or someone else “got robbed” of recognition. But are awards meaningless if no one can agree on who’s “truly” the best?
Perhaps one way to address this cognitive dissonance is to emphasize the power of filmmaking and storytelling rather than hyper–focusing on which actor receives which award. The Oscars tell this to people all the time at the beginning of their annual ceremonies, explaining how they’re celebrating all of the year’s best of film, but everyone seems to dismiss this as simple pleasantries. We cannot escape narratives in awards seasons; they inevitably influence a voter’s opinion because we are all swayable human beings. So, rather than contribute to a fruitless cycle of anger by ranting that so–and–so got snubbed, we should embrace these narratives and the actors who they carry forward. If film is the art of storytelling, it only makes sense for an actor's story to play a role in the success.
