Is It Really That Hard To Star In A Modern Biopic?

[Cena's Little Helper]

Since 2000, the Best Actor and Best Actress Oscars together have been awarded 12 times to individuals who portrayed modern public celebrities (by modern public celebrities, I mean those people of the 20th and 21st who have found fame for one reason or another). Here is a list of those individuals (the year they won the Oscar precedes their name while the modern public celebrity they portrayed follows their name):

2000 Best Actress: Hilary Swank (Brandon Teena)
2001 Best Actress: Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich)
2003 Best Actor: Adrien Brody (Wladyslaw Szpilman)
2003 Best Actress: Nicole Kidman (Virginia Woolf)
2004 Best Actress: Charlize Theron (Aileen Wuornos)
2005 Best Actor: Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles)
2006 Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Truman Capote)
2006 Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon (June Carter)
2007 Best Actor: Forest Whitaker (Idi Amin)
2007 Best Actress: Helen Mirren (Queen Elizabeth II)
2008 Best Actress: Marion Cotillard (Édith Piaf)
2009 Best Actor: Sean Penn (Harvey Milk)

Furthermore, save for Szpilman and Woolf, much video documentation (whether it be archival footage or an actual documentary) exists for each of the aforementioned modern public celebrities. Thus, for the past 10 years, 50% of the time the Best Actor and Best Actress Oscars have gone to individuals portraying people that we more than likely have seen on our television at one time or another.

While this obviously doesn't bother most of the voting members of AMPAS, it does bother me. I mean, how much effort does it really take to portray someone you can just mimic, given all of the video that you have of them? For example, let's take Charlize Theron, who won the Best Actress Oscar for playing the serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Sure, Theron had to gain weight, shave her eyebrows, have sunspots painted on her, and wear fake dentures, but she also had at her disposal a well-regarded documentary that featured many interviews with Wuornos. Who's to say that Theron didn't just watch this documentary a couple of times and get a voice coach to subsequently succeed at going through the motions? I mean, does it really take any ingenuity to do great impressions?

Now, please don't take this as me saying that it doesn't take skill to portray some public celebrities. I can't imagine how good an actor or actress much be at their craft to portray an historical figure whom we have no video footage of; in these instances, actual thought and reasoned interpretation must go into one's performance. However, in almost all of the Oscar-winning cases I have listed above, I don't see how anything worthy of praise was done. Hey, I sort of look like Oscar De La Hoya. Does that mean I can win an Oscar by portraying him in his biopic? With the right make-up artist, voice coach, and a few hours of interview footage, I'm confident that I could.

 

[jmt225]

2000 Best Actress: Hilary Swank (Brandon Teena)
2003 Best Actor: Adrien Brody (Wladyslaw Szpilman)
2004 Best Actress: Charlize Theron (Aileen Wuornos)
2005 Best Actor: Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles)
2006 Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Truman Capote)
2006 Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon (June Carter)
2007 Best Actor: Forest Whitaker (Idi Amin)

These are the people who I feel truly deserved to win an Oscar with their performances. All of those took an incredible amount of skill to portray, and each performance was done to perfection and done in a way that no other actor/actress could've pulled off the role as well as they did. That's what an Oscar winning performance is to me: Perfection and putting on a performance no else on the planet ever could. And those actors on the list above, in my opinion, accomplished that better then the other nominations in their respective years nominated.

But yes, the Academy does tend to favor roles that portray historic figures. Way too much so. But they've always been like that and will most likely remain like that. I have no idea why, but that's the way those lame fucks are. The fact that Sean Penn beat out Mickey Rourke, that Helen Mirren beat out Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts beat out Ellen Burstyn, ect. truly blows my fucking mind. None of those wins made any sense whatsoever, in my opinion.

 

[Mr. TM]

Great thread Tdigle. I mean this, you put a lot of thought into this. Now although I hardly ever pay attention to the Oscars, it is a pattern that has hit recently. Now I assume that people look at the awards for best Actor and Actress and give them to these actors for a few reasons. They are actually having to immitate someone. Playing the Joker or whatnot, is playing a fictional character, you can do it anyway you want. But you can't take those roles of real people too far. I also think they award those in movies that are easy to connect with. Critics can connect with actors in these roles.