Big Fat Story
Ten years in the trenches makes her the odds-on favorite.
For the same reason Scorsese and Newman won, Kate Winslet should win tomorrow. Nominated for her performance as a former Nazi in The Reader, Winslet has toiled in the prestige-picture trenches for over ten years, racking up five nominations and zero victories. This year she put in two stellar performances in two serious movies (the other was Revolutionary Road) and has willingly explained to anyone who will listen, at length and often with tears, just how much she wants to win an Oscar. The Reader may be a problematic film, but voters aren't going to make poor Kate suffer through another awards show without getting a little gold man of her very own. If Winslet wins, it will make for a good story—one that’s easy to imagine as a scene in the biopic of her life, the moment she finally achieved all of her professional goals.
But the obits were her “best reviews.”
Elizabeth Taylor infamously won an Academy Award for playing a prostitute in 1960’s Butterfield 8, a movie she hated and thought had a terrible script. The conventional wisdom says she won because of the enormous goodwill generated after she suffered through a near-death bout of pneumonia. Some newspapers even incorrectly reported that she had died—Taylor later told Vanity Fair reporter David Kamp, "I had the chance to read my own obituaries. They were the best reviews I'd ever gotten."
No Academy would spurn a double amputee.
Real-life WWII vet Harold Russell lost both his hands during the war. In William Wyler's classic The Best Years of Our Lives, about three soldiers re-acclimating (roughly) to civilian life, Russell played Homer Parrish, a WWII vet who...lost both his hands during the war. His performance, like the film, is realistic and moving—all those directors making lackluster Iraq pictures should take a look—but was it really good enough for an Oscar? We’ll never know, because there’s no way the Academy could have spurned a man who'd given two appendages for his country. Russell won for Best Supporting Actor, one of only two non-professionals ever to do so.
Oscar's Sympathy Votes
According to Las Vegas oddsmakers, Heath Ledger has an overwhelming 1-to-14 shot at winning the second posthumous acting Oscar ever bestowed by the Academy. (The other went to Peter "I'm Mad As Hell" Finch for his performance in Network). Ledger's vibrant, chilling turn in The Dark Knight is almost certainly good enough to have earned him a nomination even if his life hadn't been cut tragically short—but, crass as it sounds, he's winning in a walk because it was. Here are a few others who have benefited from Oscar’s sympathy.
Succumbed to heart disease months after his win.
A year after being given the Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1981, Fonda, suffering from prostate cancer and heart disease, was finally honored with his first Best Actor Oscar for On Golden Pond. Too ill to attend the ceremony, his daughter, Jane, accepted the award on his behalf. (She’d already taken home two herself.) “I bet when he heard it just now he said, ‘Hey, ain’t I lucky’,” she quipped from the podium. Five months later, Fonda died at the age of 77.
She won for Mary Poppins instead.
Julie Andrews lost out to Audrey Hepburn for the lead role in the movie version of 1964’s My Fair Lady, even though Hepburn couldn't sing (Marni Nixon of West Side Story was dubbed in), and even though Andrews had originated the role. Andrews instead signed on to Mary Poppins that year, and won Best Actress for it, in part, in the words of Turner Classic Movies, because of "sympathy for her losing out on My Fair Lady." All in all, not a bad trade.
After many nominations, finally a win—for the wrong film.
The Academy's notorious habit of giving deserving actors the big prize for undeserving performances comes down to sympathy as well. The dusky-lidded Bette Davis regarded her win for Dangerous as "a consolation prize for [Of Human] Bondage," the film she was snubbed for the previous year. “I could have won for Mother Goose," she snarked. After being nominated six times for legendary performances in films like The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, and Serpico, Al Pacino finally won for his comparatively hammy appearance in Scent of a Woman. The same logic fueled Paul Newman's Oscar win, on the seventh try, for 1986's The Color of Money, and Martin Scorsese's victory for 2006's The Departed. The remake of a Hong Kong thriller wasn't Marty's best film, but it was a good enough excuse for voters to give the legendary director the award he so obviously, heartbreakingly craved.
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The suggesion that Ledger won simply because he died is nefarious. He embodied a character more fully than any of the other nominees and with a subtly and depth that other portrayals of The Joker lack.
If you want to talk about sympathy Oscars, try Sean Penn for Milk (he was good, but come on, Frank Langella was brilliant) or Judy Dench for Shakespeare in Love post snub for Mrs. Brown.
So, the claim is not only crass, but uneducated.
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