Is There a Wrong Time to Win an Oscar?

On Sunday, the Oscars will give out their 95th Academy Awards, and with that, they will give out a statue for Best Actor.  This is, as you can imagine, one of the biggest ticket moments of the night, and of course, is one of the highest honors for any actor in their career.  Winning an Oscar generally is about more than just the performance at hand, and cynical people use this as a cudgel to wield against the ceremony, but I do think this is occasionally kind of the point-the Oscar is such a high honor, maybe it should be about more than just the performance in that year, and instead about the career that led to that win, and about the career that's happening out of it.  Either way, that is what happens.  People hold actors who have won an Academy Award to a different standard than those who merely make a movie, or who even just get nominated.  This occasionally leads to a really odd question-is there a situation where, for an actor's long-term career, it's bad to win an Oscar?  I ask this in relation to the Best Actor category because I'd argue the two men who are frontrunners for this year's ceremony, Austin Butler & Brendan Fraser, may well fear the backlash of the win as much as they could covet the statue itself.

It's worth taking a step back and looking at these two performances in relation to this question, and that's going to require me to be a bit qualitative about my thoughts on the two actors, and what they're nominated for this year so be forewarned-I'm about to have opinions.  Let's start with Butler.  Austin Butler is 31-years-old, and up until this past year, was largely known for his relationship with actress Vanessa Hudgens.  Though he has worked in Hollywood for over a decade, it's been mostly in guest spots on Disney Channel & Nickelodeon shows, and in unsuccessful teen shows like The Carrie Diaries.  Butler is attractive, almost in an absurd how-is-this-possible way, which would be unusual for a category that generally likes their winners to be in their forties or fifties, and a bit grizzled.  Even those with pretty boy pasts, like Paul Newman & Leonardo DiCaprio, had to wait until crow's feet had set in, before winning trophies.

Butler's nomination opens up a new career chapter for him.  The notices he got for Elvis, which I will note he's quite good in, are the stuff that bring on a new type of career, and already it's paying off, as he's gotten work with Denis Villeneuve & Jeff Nichols on upcoming projects.  But winning would put him in a different category all-together.  At 31, it's not entirely clear that Butler can sustain the pressure usually pitted on young men who win Best Actor before they're firmly established as stars.  While women can frequently outrun an early Oscar victory (for a variety of reasons, many of them sexist), when it comes to male performers, winning young has a rough track record.  It's hard not to think of performers like Adrien Brody or Timothy Hutton, both of whom won Oscars very early in their careers and ultimately could never live up to the hype in subsequent roles.  Brody, in particular, would feel like the rest of his career was a disappointment compared to the early career high of The Pianist.  Though he'd be the lead in King Kong, a critical success & box office champion, the victory there largely belonged to the titular gorilla, and he's spent the past two decades feeling like someone who had unfulfilled promise as a star.

It's also hard not to think of someone like Timothee Chalamet, who has spent much of his post-Oscar nomination years (he was cited for Call Me By Your Name) kind of finding himself as a performer.  While he has certainly had success, they've been in projects where he wasn't the calling card (Little Women) or where he's upstaged by the visual effects (Dune).  Much of the rest of his work since Call Me By Your Name has been in box office bombs (Beautiful Boy) or streaming titles that were released with little fanfare (The King, A Rainy Day in New York).  Without an Oscar, this could be chocked up as Chalamet finding himself, someone who clearly had great potential but needed to test his persona out with the public.  Had he won an Oscar, particularly against a screen icon like Gary Oldman (who is celebrated by a certain type of very loud Gen X cinephile as one of the great actors of his generation), the pressure & publicity around a film like Beautiful Boy underperforming at the Box Office, or The King basically being a nonentity would've led to something similar to what Brody endured.  Though I think his work in Call Me By Your Name was revolutionary (I would've voted for him), in hindsight not winning was probably for the best...and is an indication of how Butler might benefit from waiting until his second or third citation to get a statue.

Brendan Fraser would not stand out as a particularly young Best Actor winner (he is 54), and the challenge of him winning would not be the same as that of Butler.  Fraser is in the middle of a comeback.  He spent much of the 1990's as a go-to affable guy in films like George of the Jungle and The Mummy, a handsome leading man with a light comic touch in films that didn't need a lot of thespian credentials.  It's clear with roles in Gods and Monsters and The Quiet American that he aspired for this type of role, but after a series of box office flops like Dudley Do-Right and Monkeybone, as well as a number of personal setbacks including the death of his mother & a divorce from his wife Afton Smith, he largely disappeared from public consciousness until The Whale brought him back.

Fraser's career is arguably in the best spot it's been in since 1999.  The Whale was a sleeper hit, and he's costarring in upcoming films starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Glenn Close.  One could argue this is the right time to give him an Oscar...but I'm going to point out that this comes with serious risks.  There are a few reasons that Fraser could suffer, but in very different ways that Butler.  The first is that The Whale is, well, not very good.  Though your mileage may vary on his performance (which I found to be quite poor but I'll admit some give him more leeway), the film itself has already become something of a pop culture punching bag, and it's hard not to quickly compare Fraser to Rami Malek, who won in 2018 for another movie (albeit a much bigger movie) called Bohemian Rhapsody with a similar critical reception.  Like Fraser, Malek didn't have the resume of a traditional Oscar winner (nothing in Fraser's career has approached an Oscar nomination, not really, other than The Whale), and the performance was mixed-at-best.  He won off of the momentum from ardent fans, and from people obsessed with the physical transformation onscreen, but Malek's win in retrospect is considered a poor decision by Oscar.  Even worthy Oscar winners usually suffer something of a backlash for not sustaining that hype post-win (look at Anne Hathaway or Nicole Kidman, for example), but winning for a bad performance...Malek's career since then does not look like that of a traditional leading man (Bond villain, several high-profile critical & commercial flops).  Quite frankly, it looks like Oscar made a mistake.  Couple that with Fraser's performance being that of a gay man (played by a straight man) and someone who wears a fat suit for the entirety of the film, both of which are already considered to be eyebrow-raising (and I suspect in the years to come could become more taboo), and you've got the recipe for a sequel to Malek.  If you were his publicist, you might just hope Fraser loses, and can use the momentum of this nomination (which has already revitalized his career) to win for something with Scorsese or Nichols...something that would age better.

The other remaining actors would be able to handle a win better.  Paul Mescal is younger than Austin Butler, but his career has proven already that he is a once-in-a-generation talent (did you see Normal People?) that could likely sustain an early win, because he's shown he's able to top his work in Aftersun already.  Bill Nighy at age 73 would be seen as a career-capper for a longtime character actor.  There's no pressure at that age to become a leading man, so him going back to supporting roles wouldn't be seen as a failure.  And of course there's Colin Farrell, an actor who should be on his third or fourth nomination by now, and who gives the best performance in the category in The Banshees of Inisherin.  At age 46, Farrell is already a leading man & a dependable actor.  His win would give him a different career sheen, but as a man who has worked with directors as storied as Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Woody Allen, Neil Jordan, Terry Gilliam, Peter Weir, Liv Ullmann, Yorgos Lanthimos, Sofia Coppola, Tim Burton, Steve McQueen, Kenneth Branagh, & Ron Howard...this is someone who understands that putting in the work and picking the right material can pay off.  It's also notable that, like Leonardo DiCaprio before him, he hasn't selected his next project yet, and is smart enough & well-positioned enough in his career to wait a year or two for the perfect followup to a win.  All-in-all, Farrell is in the best spot to win an Oscar both in terms of quality and in terms of career position, but it doesn't look like he'll pull it off.