Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 2022

The Contenders:

Paul Mescal: Aftersun
Colin Farrell: The Banshees of Inisherin
Austin Butler: Elvis
Bill Nighy: Living
Brendan Fraser: The Whale (winner)

What’s Missing

There are a lot of options for Best Actor for 2022, and admittedly, a few of them did get nominations. But, naturally, there are a lot of people who would never get a glance from the Academy because of the films they were in. On the science fiction and fantasy front, this includes Colin Farrell. Yes, Farrell was nominated in The Banshees of Inisherin, but he could have been nominated for After Yang as well. We can also include Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing for this. Superhero movies don’t get much traction, which leaves out Robert Pattinson and The Batman, and also Brad Pitt in Bullet Train, and potentially Alexander Skarsgård in The Northman, no matter its Hamlet credentials. Oscar hates horror, too, which leaves out Ralph Fiennes in The Menu and Viggo Mortensen in Crimes of the Future. Daniel Craig will likely never get a nomination as Benoit Blanc, and he probably doesn’t really deserve it for Glass Onion, but he should be in the conversation. The same is true of Harris Dickinson and Triangle of Sadness. Two interesting choices would have been Nicolas Cage playing himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Bad decisions made Daniel Radcliffe in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story ineligible. If there’s one addition I’d make (along with Ralph Fiennes), it would be Felix Kammerer in All Quiet on the Western Front.

Weeding through the Nominees

5. To be fair, I think all of the nominations are pretty good ones, or at least I don’t hate any of them. Austin Butler did a fine job playing Elvis in the movie of the same name, but of the five nominations, I think he’s the one I can most easily move aside for someone else, like Fiennes or Kammerer. Some of this may simply be the film, though; it’s far too long for the story it tells, and it’s one of the most embarrassing performances in the storied career of Tom Hanks. There’s no clear reason that Elvis should have been in the conversation for most of the awards it was nominated for.

4. Aftersun is a movie I liked more than several of the Best Picture nominations, so it’s one that will come up in the conversation in a couple of weeks. Paul Mescal’s performance is a good one, and again, I don’t hate this nomination, and putting it in fourth shouldn’t come across as a slight. My issue with it isn’t at all the performance of Mescal, but the fact that the film is genuinely carried not by him, but by the performance of Frankie Corrio. If you’re going to get a nomination for an acting role when your costar isn’t, you should be the most magnetic thing on the screen, and most of the time, Mescal is not.

3. It’s almost certainly the case that I am punishing Bill Nighy in Living, since his performance is probably better than I want to say it is. I like Nighy in general, but that’s going to be balanced here by the fact that Living feels like a remake that didn’t need to be made. There’s nothing wrong with Ikiru that necessitated another version of the film. In that respect, Nighy is in kind of a thankless position, putting in a very good-to-great performance in a film that really didn’t need to be made. That’s uncomfortable for me, but the fact that I’ve put it third is a good indication of how much I like Bill Nighy.

2. I have slowly started warming to Colin Farrell. For a long time, he always felt like the worst part of most of the movies he was in, and I always went into his performances expecting to be frustrated by him—something that sticks with me in his films directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. But here, paired with his In Bruges costar Brendan Gleeson, Farrell is brilliant, heartbreaking, and very real. This is a performance that he had in him somewhere, and I didn’t know he had it in him. Good on him, and this was a very worthy nomination.

1. Limited to the five nominations, Oscar did the right thing in giving the statue to Brendan Fraser, even if there are a lot of people who didn’t love what he did with this role. It’s probably true that Fraser’s win is in part due to his redemption arc, a man who was ignored by Hollywood and whose life had bottomed out, but it’s also likely true that he used a great deal of that pain to portray the terrible inner world of Charlie. I love this arc for Fraser, and if I have to give the statue to someone who was actually nominated, he’s going to always be my choice.

My Choice

But the reality of things is that my favorite two performances for this category were unnominated—Felix Kammerer and Ralph Fiennes. Given the choice of the two, I’m going to give the statue to Fiennes, who never gets the respect that he deserves from Oscar. The man has done pure evil, incredible dramas, compelling cyberpunk, and he has comedic chops as well. Fiennes is the complete package and The Menu is some of his best work. He’s my choice in an open field.

Final Analysis