No major male movie star was ever so regularly or unjustly overlooked at Oscar time.
Year after year Grant’s seemingly effortless charm and ability were taken for, well, Granted.
Bringing Up Baby stands out for Grant gleefully trashing his supposed unflappability, equally
adept at playing neurotic stooge to a take-charge Katharine Hepburn, plus leopard.
But there’s no hiding his pinpoint physical clowning and comic timing in Howard Hawks’s
screwball classic.
The Academy had never honoured a foreign-language performance when Akira Kurosawa’s game-changing
action epic was released.
Yet Seven Samurai did receive a couple of nominations – and was owed another for its
force-of-nature leading man.
Mifune’s outcast is the film’s primal heart.
Given free reign by Kurosawa, he based his characterization on wild animals, though when
his secret personal shame is revealed, he’s perhaps the most human warrior of them all.
It’s a fearless, blazing performance, from one of world cinema’s greatest leading men.
Which Bill Murray do you prefer?
The freewheeling smart-mouth of Ghostbusters?
Or the crying-on-the-inside clown of Lost in Translation?
Groundhog Day’s central, endless timeloop quandary means that here, you get both.
Murray has a blast exploiting endless variations of bad, and ultimately, good behaviour
from his self-centred weatherman.
Seamlessly shifting from world-weary cynicism to openhearted sincerity, Groundhog Day is
high-concept comedy as high art, held together by Murray’s high wire virtuosity.
Perkins had already been nominated four years prior, and so was on the Academy’s radar.
Psycho was a sensation.
Though while Hitchcock and Janet Leigh both got nods, perhaps the most indelible horror
movie performance of all time somehow did not.
Long before Norman Bates’s true nature emerges, Perkins evokes the tortured mind behind the
momma’s boy-next-door.
Hitchcock’s brutal shift of audience identification to Norman only works because of the actor’s
helpless vulnerability, making the climactic reveal even more chilling.
Perkins himself never seemed to entirely shake his defining role.
And neither did we.
A true American maverick, Harry Dean Stanton’s first-ever leading role, in Wim Wenders’s
evocative road movie is unforgettable.
Re-emerging from self-inflicted desert isolation, his damaged loner attempts to repair the fractured
family he left behind.
It’s a performance that never remotely feels like acting, whether reconnecting with his son,
or in his moving climactic confession to his wife.
Stanton is equally good in his swansong Lucky, but his Paris, Texas work is as iconic – and
unheralded – as the man himself.
Despite the fierce competition, we can’t repeat the Academy’s mistakes and ignore
Grant again.
Although, wonderful as he is in Baby, another dozen or so performances would be fine alternatives.