The Oscars' real people problem
Sunday, April 11, 2021 at 8:20AM 
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty tired of the biopic domination of the acting Oscar categories. Admittedly, such distaste comes from my general dislike of prestige cinema's biographical genre, but the situation is truly glaring. This year, 45% of the nominated performances are of real people whose lives were dramatized on-screen, exercises in actorly mimicry, and direct emulation. It's not that these achievements aren't impressive or worthy of awards, but that they're over-represented a great deal. Most narrative films aren't dramatizations of actual events or the lives of celebrities no matter how much AMPAS' selection might make us think otherwise. It's a pity that other kinds of character construction tend to be underappreciated while biopic roles become frontrunners before anyone has even seen the movie…
Real-life characters have been present amid acting lineups since the early days of the Academy Awards. In the second year of the prizes' existence, Corinne Griffith and Lewis Stone were contenders for two such roles. They were Lady Emma Hamilton in The Divine Lady and Count Ludwig Pahlen in The Patriot, respectively. By the awards' third year, we even had our first victorious thespian in a biopic, George Arliss having conquered the Best Actor trophy for his reptilian take on former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Nevertheless, these sorts of roles only represented a small percentage of the honored work, somewhat reflecting the realities of the industry. Not so, today.
The easiest way to show how the phenomenon has intensified is to check out the winning performances over the Oscars' 92 first years. These are the winning star turns that dramatize a person that lived in our world instead of a fictional creation.
BEST ACTRESS
- Luise Rainer, The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
- Jennifer Jones, The Song of Bernadette (1943)
- Ingrid Bergman, Anastasia (1956)
- Joanne Woodward, The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
- Susan Hayward, I Want to Live! (1958)
- Anne Bancroft, The Miracle Worker (1962)
- Katharine Hepburn, The Lion in Winter (1968)
- Barbra Streisand, Funny Girl (1968)
- Sally Field, Norma Rae (1979)
- Sissy Spacek, Coal Miner's Daughter (1980)
- Jodie Foster, The Accused (1988)
- Susan Sarandon, Dead Man Walking (1995)
- Hilary Swank, Boys Don't Cry (1999)
- Julia Roberts, Erin Brockovich (2000)
- Nicole Kidman, The Hours (2002)
- Charlize Theron, Monster (2003)
- Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line (2005)
- Helen Mirren, The Queen (2006)
- Marion Cotillard, La vie en Rose (2007)
- Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side (2009)
- Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady (2011)
- Olivia Colman, The Favourite (2018)
- Renée Zellweger, Judy (2019)
23 out of 95 winners, roughly 24% of winning performances.
BEST ACTOR
- George Arliss, Disraeli (1930)
- Charles Laughton, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)
- Paul Muni, The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936)
- Spencer Tracy, Boys Town (1938)
- Gary Cooper, Sergeant York (1941)
- James Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
- Yul Brynner, The King and I (1956)
- Paul Scoffield, A Man for All Seasons (1966)
- George C. Scott, Patton (1970)
- Robert De Niro, Raging Bull (1980)
- Ben Kingsley, Gandhi (1982)
- F. Murray Abraham, Amadeus (1984)
- Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot (1989)
- Jeremy Irons, Reversal of Fortune (1990)
- Geoffrey Rush, Shine (1996)
- Adrien Brody, The Pianist (2002)
- Jamie Foxx, Ray (2004)
- Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote (2005)
- Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland (2006)
- Sean Penn, Milk (2008)
- Colin Firth, The King's Speech (2010)
- Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln (2012)
- Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club (2013)
- Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything (2014)
- Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant (2015)
- Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour (2017)
- Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
27 out of 93 winners, roughly 29% of winning performances.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
- Alice Brady, In Old Chicago (1937)
- Shelley Winters, The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)
- Patty Duke, The Miracle Worker (1962)
- Estelle Parsons, Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
- Vanessa Redgrave, Julia (1977)
- Mary Steenburgen, Melvin & Howard (1980)
- Maureen Stapleton, Reds (1981)
- Brenda Fricker, My Left Foot (1989)
- Judi Dench, Shakespeare in Love (1998)
- Marcia Gay Harden, Pollock (2000)
- Jennifer Connelly, A Beautiful Mind (2001)
- Cate Blanchett, The Aviator (2004)
- Melissa Leo, The Fighter (2010)
- Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a Slave (2013)
- Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl (2015)
- Allison Janney, I, Tonya (2017)
16 out of 84 winners, roughly 19% of winning performances.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
- Joseph Schildkraut, The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
- Walter Brennan, The Westerner (1940)
- Anthony Quinn, Viva Zapata! (1952)
- Anthony Quinn, Lust for Life (1956)
- Peter Ustinov, Spartacus (1960)
- Jason Robards, All the President's Men (1976)
- Jason Robards, Julia (1977)
- Haing S. Ngor, The Killing Fields (1984)
- Sean Connery, The Untouchables (1987)
- Joe Pesci, Goodfellas (1990)
- Martin Landau, Ed Wood (1994)
- Jim Broadbent, Iris (2001)
- Chris Cooper, Adaptation (2002)
- Christian Bale, The Fighter (2010)
- Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies (2015)
- Mahershala Ali, Green Book (2018)
16 out of 84 winners, roughly 19% of winning performances.
I excluded characters who are fictionalized versions of actual people whose names were purposefully omitted as well as composite roles. That excludes victors like Jane Wyman and Jared Leto, despite their performances blossoming from real-life events. All that aside, one can see an apparent increase from the 80s onwards, reaching its present apotheosis in the 21st century's first two decades. After all, if one were to expand these considerations to the nominees, we'd see how, for instance, 80% of the last 15 Best Supporting Actor contenders were playing real-life characters. While I love plenty of those performances, it's difficult not to be a bit vexed at these numbers. How did we get to this place, where any English-speaking biopic is automatically an Oscar contender from the instant their production is announced?
We can notice the first clue of the shifting paradigm in the 80s. The decade started with Sissy Spacek and Robert DeNiro's crowning for achievements whose value was often linked to an actor's transformation into a celebrity impersonator. Whether we like it or not, evaluating acting is subjective, an objective opinion about it being a contradiction in terms. In some regard, the biopic aspect of performance offers an easy barometer for assessing technical virtuosity that isn't easy to ascertain with fictional characters. Comparing screen presence to the real-life origin, we can more easily comprehend the performer's choices. It's easy to see what they nail, what they get wrong, what they conspicuously circumvent, change, mutate. Thus, the illusion of objectivity is summoned.
That and Harvey Weinstein twisted the whole system. While it's unnerving to mention that vile man's name, it's hard to discuss Oscar's history without colliding with his perfidious legacy. One of Miramax's earlier successes was My Left Foot, and the campaign mounted for Daniel Day-Lewis created a model to be imitated many times over. We can draw a straight line from the actor's many public appearances celebrating Christy Brown, including in front of the American Senate, to the "honor the movie, honor the man" nonsense that marked The Imitation Game's awards run. By the early 2000s, the strategy had solidified, and biopics were in a FastTrack to gold. Not much has changed in the interim, prestige movie-making having shaped itself around such Oscar-seeking gamesmanship.
At the point we're at, it's starting to be rare to see an acting lineup utterly exempt from any biopic variant. In the past decade, it has happened only twice, with the 2010 Best Actress race and the 2011 Best Supporting Actress lineup. The male acting categories have been lost to real people-mania altogether. Again, it's not that these performances or movies are inherently bad. They're not, and much great cinema has been created by telling stories from real life, from the history books, the newspapers. The problem is a growing lack of variety. Cinema isn't a monolith, but AMPAS has rarely acknowledged that, their particular vices resulting in entire genres being marginalized, nationalities, ethnicities, etc. We don't need a default recognition of prestige studio biopics to add to those problems. Maybe if the Academy wasn't so fixated on real people's stories, Delroy Lindo could have gotten a nod instead of Gary Oldman in Mank. Who knows?
Reader Comments (30)
The Oscars should be about the best achievements, the best performances. If they think that give best performances in a particular category are from biopics, then they should nominate them. What bothers me more, is when there is politics involved, or when the Oscars are decided on Twitter, or with critics' groups and we keep seeing the same films rewarded over again.
"Comparing screen presence to the real-life origin, we can more easily comprehend the performer's choices. It's easy to see what they nail, what they get wrong, what they conspicuously circumvent, change, mutate. Thus, the illusion of objectivity is summoned."
That really isn't the case with a lot of these performances though. The vast majority of viewers do not know the real-life personalities of people like Christy Brown, Sister Helen Prejean, Queen Anne, Don Shirley, John Laroche, Alicia Nash, Lynda Dummar, Micky Ward, Hugh Glass, Dith Pran, Sarah Tobias, etc etc. These people and their true personalities are just not in the cultural consciousness.
Every once in awhile you get your Judy or a Freddie Mercury, but I can't really be bothered to get worked up over this I guess.
With all the respect, but what is most annoying is someone winning a oscar for a terrible performance or a ok performance and not for a biopic performance.
I liked a lot the oscar conversation, but from some past years to now, the conversation started to be something more like a "fandom" thing determinating what they considered is right of what actual is right.
A lot of people are complaining about Gary Old man in Mank. Did you all complain about Riz Ahmed and Steve Yeung or Chadwick Boseman? Because all of them did a good work and we're nominated. The aren't GREAT work. Riz what better and Nightcrawler, Steve in Burning, Chadwick in Black Panther.
Mads, Hopkins, Oldman, Lindo and Lakeith did outstanding work.
But no talk about it because the "fandom" didn't approve their achievement.
I ask myself what is the most dangerous thing to the oscar conversation:
The predictors who thing they really know something (they jobs are essentially predict the oscars - lottery prediction I call);
The film twitter who think how to judge a movie (and they don't know 90% of the time);
The fandom who demands awards for some people and hate for others.
Very well said!
I though Oldman was terrific in Mank - and I think that Herman J. Mankiewicz doesn't quite count in the same way as, say Freddie Meecury or Stephen Hawking or a number others on the list, because Mank isn't nearly as well known. And so the element of rewarding an impersonation - or even rewarding the real-life figure - doesn't loom as large.
But yes - too many performances of real-life figures get nominated, especially when one looks at the past twenty years.
The biggest problem for me is the increase in biopic roles of famous people, especially in the lead categories. These can become caricatures all too often (not that they necessarily do). 8 of the last 9 in Best Actress, 11 of the last 13 in Best Actor were recognizably famous figures.
In a bad biopic performance everyone notices an original character not so much as we have nothing to go on but what the actor gives us.
We can all now see clips online of Maggie Thatcher and Freddie Mercury so now those type of performances are held up for bigger scrutiny whereas years previous they weren't.
I think this list could be narrowed further as some are just fictionalized versions of real people not straight biopics. Just taking a name from a history book and writing a story around them doesn't qualify as a biography in my opinion.
To put things in context and as a HUGE Da 5 Bloods fan, and ecstatic about the career-best performance by Lindo, this is my lead actor line up:
Javier Bardem, The Roads not Taken
Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Anthony Hopkins, The Father
Ivan Massagué, The Platform (El Hoyo)
Gary Oldman, Mank
No Lindo, no Ahmed... both miss it in favor of Bardem and Massagué... and yes, I've seen Minari, so Yeun is up there as well, but after all the other 7 gentlemen... and some others.
First Claudio post I'm not sold out at. Many of the biopic performances awarded are not from famous people.
While I'm in agreement with your overall premise, I think there needs to be more distinction in this list. Many of the early biopic roles you list -- Bernadette (as in Song of), Annie Sullivan, Pasteur -- were from pre-sound cinema days, so no one had any preconceptions of how the characters should look or speak. (The Three Faces of Eve lady only existed on the page, meaning Woodward could make anything of her she wished.) And some characters, though "real", are more or less fictionalized by the filmmakers -- Salieri, Anastasia (the scene with Helen Hayes was totally imaginary), Mrs. O'Leary, on and on. In that context, I don't know why people are focusing criticism on Gary Oldman, whose Mank is more a unique creation (since I had no idea how Mankiewicz spoke or acted) than his Winston Churchlll.
My issue -- and it's basically only arisen from Jamie Foxx/Ray onward -- is the biography of figures so well known and documented in contemporary media that the roles become close to celebrity impersonations. Some are better than others -- Whitaker's Amin and Penn's Harvey Milk shine -- but too many (Redmayne, Oldman) just do Frank Gorshin-like impressions. And then we get that "look: the real people" footage at the end, as if showing how much they resembled their models is the arbiter of great acting.
I don't mind a truly exceptional biographical performance winning. But when mediocre ones win just as easily, it tells us voters have strayed pretty far from the idea of honoring great acting. The fact that many are predicting Andra Day -- unknown actress in a crap film -- to win best actress this year simply because she plays Billie Holiday tells us how far down the rabbit hole this trend has gone.
The real problem in my opinion is the popular thinking that Oscar are the most important movie award. Is the most popular yes, but is very far to be the most "relevant" or "serious".
This morning I was chatting with my brother about how latinoamerican films are too depending of the aprobation in Hollywood to be not just considered good but actually to be watched.
If Oscars just want to include USA films in the nominations I'm OK with it, they are rewarding their own industry and has a specific category to recognize foreign films, but the constant complaining from people about an item causes that popular associations tries to be more inclusive but most of the times it ends to look more forced than a natural decission.
This kind of articles are very interesting for me, more for the merely statics than the categorization of a trend as good or bad. And let's be fair, sometimes actors decide to be part of certain films because they know the tendences that gonna help them to be rewarded.
Not all the time actors work for the same reason that Monsieur Oscar: the beauty of the act.
I think bio pics are fine. As an audience we tend to identify fictional characters by the Oscar winning performer. We all know the country western singer Sissy Spacek played in Coal Miner’s Daughter. Not too many can name the country singer Jeff Bridges played in Crazy Heart. There are few original Oscar recognized characters who provide enduring cultural recognition - Hannibal Lecter and Forrest Gump. Certainly not more recent winning yet non-descript ones -Lee Chandler and George Valentin. Audiences want characters with whom to identify.
I think much more concerning is the artistic prominence Oscar has bestowed upon comic book adaptations as opposed to a preference for “true” stories of actual events.
I don't think such films like The Hours or The Favorite are biopics...
Roles like Queen Anne aren't really biopics. Lanthimos's characters bear no resemblance to their real life counterparts.
A lot of biopic acting academy friendly because it allows for capital A acting, and because they’re people that automatically garner the sympathy of the audience. That’s not to say some of these performances aren’t real achievements - Zellweger was spectacular in Judy, for ex - but some of the leg work is done, making it easier to root for the performer and nominate them.
I will say, though that I think there’s a difference between a biopic performance and something that’s slightly more styluses. For example, I don’t really see what Viola does in Ma Rainey’s or Nicole in the Hours as traditional biopic performances largely because they’re not as tied to those genres.
Thank you all for the helpful feedback and valid criticisms. I can see I should have articulated things better, probably be more specific in my observations, and not overuse the term biopic so much
Regardless, I think even characters like Queen Anne, while eschewing the celebrity biopic model, still carry with them an added prestige because they are a "true" story. At least, that's how I often feel. The fact an actor is breathing life into a true story is brought up in campaigns, even when their characters aren't well-known. I may be wrong, of course.
Still, apologies for what may be a subpar article. Guess one can't win them all.
(I thought this article was going to be about real people unable or unwilling to attend the Oscar ceremony.)
While I'm not a fan of the Academy rewarding mimicry as a substitute/shortcut to good acting, this article feels like an incomplete argument. Is the problem that there are too many nominees playing real people, or too many winners playing real people? At best, the stats show a recent trend toward biopic wins, but they (or much else here) really don't explain why real people roles tend to get nominated at the expense of fictional roles.
I know a lot of you have strong opinions about biopics, but let's look at it a different way. Every actor is provided with a screenplay (or, in Maria Bakalova's case, a scripted framework from which she improvises). The question then is what ELSE does the actor have to work with, that doesn't come directly from the screenwriter?
Compare two Best Actress nominees from 2011, Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady and Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Margaret Thatcher was a real person; Lisbeth Salander is fictional. But consider the resources each could choose to work with besides the script.
Meryl Streep: a John Campbell biography from which the script was loosely adapted, other third party accounts, archival coverage and works of Margaret Thatcher, previous performances in unrelated projects by other actresses
Rooney Mara: the novel, Noomi Rapace's performance of the same material
Meryl has a greater number of tangential resources (too many, really) but Rooney has at least an equal challenge to avoid mimicry because her additional material is so on point. I could argue that the role of Lisbeth Salander is as real as the role of Margaret Thatcher. (The other three nominees that year: Glenn Close had a novella about Albert Nobbs and her own stage performance; Viola Davis had the novel The Help; Michelle Williams had a pair of filming diaries and The Prince and the Showgirl, plus countless other Marilyn Monroe portrayals.)
Here are the Best Supporting Actor nominees (one fictional role and four real people), in order to least to most amount of additional material. I picked this category because I've seen all five.
1. Paul Raci, Sound of Metal. The script and story are based on a previous unfinished film project, which may or may not have had a character like him (so he might have had less to work with than his co-star Riz Ahmed).
2. LaKeith Stanfield, Judas and the Black Messiah. William O'Neal was a real person, but as an FBI informant who eventually went into Witness Protection, there's not much information about him. The film re-creates part of one TV interview he did in 1989.
3, Leslie Odom Jr, One Night in Miami. The screenwriter adapted his own play, which speculates an interaction between four famous people who converged at the same time and place. We know more about how Sam Cooke sang, maybe even how he performed in Detroit, but less about how he spoke or argued.
4. Daniel Kaluuya, Judas and the Black Messiah. We know the public Fred Hampton from documentaries, including Black Panther film footage from that time, and the private man from his wife, who consulted on the film.
5. Sacha Baron Cohen, The Trial of the Chicago 7. We know the most about Abbie Hoffman from trial transcripts, his direct performances to live audiences, and accounts from still-living participants.
If the Academy has a bias toward real people, then I go in the opposite direction. I prefer it when an actor has more to create within a performance, and I am unsurprised that I lean toward Raci and Stanfield here.
There are a couple of these that are technically "based on specific real people" like Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Revenant" that seem to fall outside of the sprit of the complaint being made. I had completely forgotten that the main character was a real person.
I think the basic argument is valid. Two of the best performances of the 1980s were Albert Finney and Diane Keaton in SHOOT THE MOON, but they were denied Oscar nominations. Finney really deserved the slot that went to Jack Lemmon playing the real life character from MISSING. Keaton was at least as good as Sissy Spacek as a real person in MISSING and Jessica Langue in the biopic FRANCIS. I know there were other factors, like general Oscar love for MISSING across the categories, but you get the idea. One could probably replace one or two people every year who got a nomination playing a real person that really should have gone to someone else. How much real, complex acting was going on under all that prosthetic in THE ELEPHANT MAN? Still, John Hurt got a nomination that I would argue would have better gone to Donald Sutherland in ORDINARY PEOPLE or really, if category fraud didn't exist, Timothy Hutton for the same film, but he was bumped to supporting
Bafta threw us a new curve ball and gave the lead trophies to Frances and Sir Anthony,the predicted Kaluuya and Yun-Jung won supporting
Jesús, you're totally biased
I think there is a big difference between bios of people who are non-celebrities and those who have lived their adult lives in the public eye. For example, Ali. When I saw the film I thought Will Smith did an admirable job, but he just wasn't Muhammed Ali. Why not use documentary footage and just employ Smith for dramatizing the events not already caught on camera? Especially someone as inimitable as Ali. No one could play him better than he himself. Anthony Hopkins and Nixon is another example, but for me it applies to all personalities who already have a strong impression from being filmed so much.
James -- hmmm. when did Oscar bestow prominence on comic book adaptations? They've ignored them for years, only ever showing interest in a semi-consistent way with Batman movies over the years and even then it was very limited interest. Aside from that one year where Black Panther had a pretty strong nomination count, i dont really see it. What films are you thinking of specifically here?
Mark -- love a curveball. The BAFTA post is up.
I'd like to point out a different trend that bothers me when it comes to this "real people" thing, and that's this trend of giving the Oscar for Best Make-Up and Hairstyling to films that turn recognizable celebrities into monstrous hybrids of themselves and the real-life people they play. This has happened three years in a row (Darkest Hour, Vice, Bombshell), and while the make-up work in those films is impressive, I found it really distracting when it came to the performance, because by making these actors look the closest thing to their real-life counterparts, they turn them into something that barely looks human (this is why I connected more to Margot Robbie and Kate McKinnon in Bombshell, they were allowed to look more like themselves, and therefore more human).
I do agree with everyone that says that there are levels to this. I definitely would not include Olivia Colman, because while Queen Anne did exist, I feel the character created by Deborah David and Tony McNamara and performed by Colman is an original creation inspired by a real person (same with F. Murray Abraham as Salieri or Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass), while with performances like Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, the point of the performance is to be the closest thing to their real-life counterpart.
This is why I prefer performances that find a perfect middle ground between mimicking the real-life person and injecting enough of themselves to make it an original creation. Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon is a good example of this. Another is Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers. I would also argue Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland (she went a little further into mimicry, but still made it her own).
Richter Scale: I'd argue Michelle Williams is a master at this -- both her Marilyn Monroe and Gwen Verdon suggested the familiar characteristics of the real folk (the breathy and rasp voices, respectively), but felt freshly imagined and not mere imitation.
I think AMPAS embrace of comic books began with the celebration of film that prompted comic book adaptations - Star Wars. Before 1977, you don’t find comic adaptations on Oscar ballots at all. The success of George Lucas’s film fostered a sense of legitimacy for the recognition of comic book adaptations.
From there, we see comic book adaptations begin to make inroads into the technical categories with increasing regularity (* = win) and then with Dick Tracy in 1990 into the above the line categories.
1978 Superman Visual Effects*, Sound, Film Editing, Score
1989 Batman Art Direction*
1990 Dick Tracy Art Direction*, Music*, Make up*, Supporting Actor,, Cinematography, Costumes, Sound
1991 The Addams Family Costume
1992 Batman Returns Visual Effects, Make up
1993 Addams Family Values Art Direction
1994 The Mask Visual Effects
1995 Batman Forever Cinematography, Sound, Sound Effects Editing
2002 Spider-Man Sound, Visual Effects
2004 Sider-Man 2 Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Visual Effects
2005 Batman Begins Cinematography
2006 Superman Returns Visual Effects
2008 Iron Man Visual Effects, Sound Editing
2008 The Dark Knight Supporting Actor* Sound Editing*, Cinematography, Film Editing, Art Direction, Make Up, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects
2010 Iron Man 2 Visual Effects
2012 The Avengers Visual Effects
2013 Iron Man 3 Visual Effects
2014 Captain America: The Winter Soldier Visual Effects
2014 X Men: Days of Future Past Visual Effects
2014 Guardians of the Galaxy Make up, Visual Effects
2016 Doctor Strange Visual Effects
2017 Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 Visual Effects
2017 Logan Adapted Screenplay
2018 Avengers: Infinity War Visual Effects
2018 Black Panther Art Direction*, Costume*, Music*, Picture, Song,Sound Editing, Sound Mixing
2019 Avengers: Endgame Visual Effects
2019 Joker Actor*, Music*, Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Costume, Make up, Film Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing
The worst one has to be Rami Malek.
Funny, but I’ve always thought the best performances should be nominated, regardless of the kind of roles...
For the most part we don't even really know who these biopic characters are. While some are famous people, most are not. Was Norma Rae famous before the film? How about the characters in My Left Foot or The Killing Fields or The Fighter?
Still there were several performances that were not nominated despite actors playing real-life people:
Mark Wahlberg as Micky Ward - "The Fighter"
Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover - "Hoover"
Jack Black as Bernie Tiede - "Bernie"
John Hawkes as Mark O'Brien - "The Sessions"
Bill Murray as Franklin D. Roosevelt - "Hyde Park on Hudson"
Idris Elba as Nelson Mandela - "Mandela: Walk to Freedom"
Tom Hanks as Captain Richard Phillips - "Captain Phillips"
David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. - "Selma"
Christoph Waltz as Walter Keane - "Big Eyes"
Steve Carell as Mike Baum - "The Big Short"
Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu - "Concussion"
Joel Edgerton as Richard Loving - "Loving"
Hugh Grant as St. Clair Bayfield - "Florence Foster Jenkins"
Jonah Hill as Efraim Diveroli - "War Dogs"
Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs - "Battle of the Sexes"
James Franco as Tommy Wiseau - "The Disaster Artist"
Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee - "The Post"
Lucas Hedges as Jared Eamons - "Boy Erased"
Robert Redford as Forrest Tucker - "The Old Man and the Gun"
John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy - "Stan & Ollie"
John David Washington as Ron Stallworth - "BlacKkKlansman"
Christian Bale as Ken Miles - "Ford vs. Ferrari"
Taron Egerton as Elton John - "Rocketman"
Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore - "Dolemite Is My Name"
Tahar Rahim as Mohamedou Ould Salahi - "The Mauritanian"
And those are only in Best Actor...
It's interesting to read the pushback here. I think one thing that's interesting is the way playing a real life character does some of the campaign work for an actor. It nets them interviews and offers them a lot of opportunities to talk about their process and research to the press, helping along their campaign when others, playing fictional characters, may not be asked about that as much.
Think about the way Renee or Meryl were asked about their process of becoming Judy and Maggie Thatcher, vs. Glenn during her Wife campaign. There, interviewers discussed the themes of the story more vs. the acting she was doing - I think it makes a difference in generating buzz and the perception of the performer.