Emmy Watch: Best Lead Actor in a Limited Series/Movie

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

Let's move on to the acting races for limited series and TV movies. Last year, this category didn’t have a single nominee from a TV movie. The two leading contenders in this race are sure to reverse that trend – Hugh Jackman (Bad Education), a past Emmy winner for hosting the Tony Awards, and Aaron Paul (El Camino), who took home three Emmys for playing the same part on Breaking Bad. After that, it’s back to the limited series to find most of the other probable nominees…

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Almost There: Colin Farrell in "In Bruges"

 by Cláudio Alves

Colin Farrell is a fascinating actor. Early on in his career, he got good notices for his work in Joel Schumacher's Tigerland, but his following movies did little to build on that promise and make him a respected up and coming star. Instead, he became a mainstay of action movies of the early aughts, gaining popularity but not being much respected as an actor. On paper, 2004's Alexander looked like his big Oscar bid, but the Oliver Stone historical epic crashed and burned most spectacularly. Still, Farrell has always shown a keen eye when it comes to working with prestigious directors. He's collaborated with Stone, Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, Peter Weir, Liv Ullmann, Sofia Coppola, Steve McQueen, and Yorgos Lanthimos, among others. His work with Lanthimos has been particularly revelatory.

An actor so game to challenge himself and with such a résumé seems like someone who should have left a mark in the awards game. However, Farrell has very rarely been a contender for acting honors. Regarding the Oscars, he came closest in 2008…

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Almost There: Harrison Ford in "Raiders of the Lost Ark"

by Cláudio Alves

As we well know, AMPAS has major genre bias, preferring the prestigious quality of respectable dramas above everything else. Even when they decide to embrace a genre picture, there's a branch of the Academy that's always ready to turn their collective noses at them with unashamed snobbery. We're talking about the actors, whose distaste for anything remotely close to action movies, adventure, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and so forth, has robbed many great performers of the recognition they so richly deserve. Truth be told, this is a problem that goes beyond the Oscar voters and even affects popular views on the art of acting.

If you want a good example of this, look to the awards race of 1981, when Raiders of the Lost Ark was a major success with critics and audiences alike...

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Did Paul Newman win for the wrong movie?

by Cláudio Alves

Throughout the history of the Academy Awards, many a winner conquered their statue not because they were the best of the year, but because they had a grand filmography in need of golden recognition. Career Oscars are a bittersweet sort of honor, though. On one hand, it feels just to see living legends rewarded with Hollywood's most coveted trophy. On the other, the win sometimes comes from such a minor work it doesn't feel representative of the artist's true genius. In terms of acting prizes, Paul Newman is one of the most flagrant cases of a winner that was rewarded for his career rather than the merits of one performance. By the time he won a competitive Oscar, he had been nominated seven times already and had even won the first of two Honorary prizes. He might have agreed with those judgments, considering he wasn’t even present to receive the statuette.

At least, that's what most people seem to believe about the great star's Best Actor trophy for 1986's The Color of Money…

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Almost There: Paul Newman & Robert Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"

by Cláudio Alves

From 1944 to 2008, we had a five-wide Best Picture race in the Oscars, as well as four acting categories. During those years, it became rare for a movie to score a Picture nomination without also nabbing some sort of acting nod. It was especially unusual for the majority of a given line-up to be devoid of acting nods, happening only three times during those 65 years. One of those times was the 1969 Academy Awards, when Z, Hello, Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid didn't get any love from the acting branch. Considering the general bias against "foreign language" performances and the horrible reviews of a certain musical, it's easy to understand why the actors of Z and Hello, Dolly! went unrecognized. But what about the revisionist western in the bunch?…

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