By Seth Lukas Hynes
History was made at the 95th Oscars ceremony on March 13, but it also had a slightly disappointing acting result.
Everything Everywhere All At Once took home seven Oscars, and became the very first science fiction film to win Best Picture (unless you count The Shape of Water, which is more urban fantasy than sci-fi). The fact that a bonkers action-packed sci-fi film earned so much awards love – three acting Oscars, Editing, Original Screenplay, Best Director for the Daniels duo, and Best Picture – is exciting and endlessly encouraging to me.
Michelle Yeoh, the star of Everything Everywhere All At Once, became the first Asian woman and second woman of colour (after Halle Berry in 2002) to win Best Actress, and her speech contained an inspiring message for every woman watching: ’Don’t let anybody tell you you are ever past your prime.’
Jamie Lee Curtis, who won Best Supporting Actress for EEAAO, graciously honoured the hundreds of people who worked on the film – ’We just won an Oscar!’ – and Ke Huy Quan’s unbridled joy at winning Best Supporting Actor (also for EEAAO) was magical.
Yeoh, Quan and Curtis’s Oscars together are a win for range: within EEAAO’s multiverse narrative, these actors each shift between so many markedly different versions of their characters, conjuring laughs, deep pathos and even both.
Brendan Fraser won Best Actor for The Whale, which I’m not so happy about. The Whale is one of those films that became worse the more I thought about it. The film has strong performances, engaging dialogue and a well-paced essay-like structure: an opening thesis of Charlie, a morbidly-obese teacher, trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter Ellie, followed by “paragraphs” developing this conflict and the backstories of his friends and family, leading to a conclusion. But if I had to grade this essay, I’d give it a B-minus, as the conclusion is sloppy and unearned.
Ellie is so cruel and spiteful that I don’t believe the plot’s insistence that she is a good person deep down, and I don’t think writer-director Darren Aronofsky intended to leave her morality ambiguous. As such, the hopeful ending falls flat. There is also an uncomfortable disconnect between Charlie demanding honesty from Ellie and his students and the inherent artifice of Fraser wearing a CGI-enhanced fat-suit.
Setting aside my misgivings over the movie, Fraser delivers a poignant but charming performance, he and Aronofsky bring dignity to what could have been a grotesque caricature, and it’s nice to see a talented actor win an Oscar after such a long career slump.
But I wanted Austin Butler, the star of Elvis, to win Best Actor. Like Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln and Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Butler becomes Elvis, conveying his swagger, allure and musical passion, but also his poor judgement and failing health as the show-business machine takes its toll. Elvis Presley’s family lauded Butler’s performance, and Butler played the part so well that he still hasn’t completely lost the accent.
Fraser’s paradoxical performance in The Whale is moving yet static. Fraser plays a dying man desperate to reconnect for two hours, and Charlie is more of a focal point than an active character: the
relationships around him change, but he himself changes very little. By embodying Elvis, in his meteoric rise and weary, exhausted decline, Butler delivers a more substantive, dynamic evocation of character, and thus deserved the Oscar.
I had much the same attitude in 2016: Michael Fassbender should have won Best Actor, not Leonardo DiCaprio. As Hugh Glass in The Revenant, DiCaprio undeniably gives a compelling performance of raw survival and vengeance, but as Steve Jobs in the film of the same name, Fassbender portrays a more complex, nuanced and evolving character. While this viewpoint may relate more to writing than acting, Fassbender and Butler’s performances both have more dramatic meat on their bones.
Even a groundbreaking Oscar ceremony like this one can’t get everything right, and while Austin Butler didn’t win the Best Actor Oscar, I can console myself with the fact that he won a Golden Globe, BAFTA and AACTA award for Elvis.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
