Good news, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro: Playing a killer can win you an Oscar

Bad guys tend to have a good time at the Oscars. From Christoph Waltz‘s 2010 “Inglourious Basterds” win for Best Supporting Actor to Anthony Hopkins‘ iconic 1992 Best Actor win for “The Silence of the Lambs,” you can always count on Oscar voters to take notice of a villain.

While those two examples are fictional, some actors have also had Oscar luck by playing real-life killers. For example, Charlize Theron won for playing Aileen Wuornos. Wuornos murdered seven men between 1989 and 1990 while she was a prostitute in Florida. She shot and robbed the seven men, who Wuornos claimed were clients who had either raped or attempted to rape, claiming self-defense. However, she was sentenced to death and executed in 2002 for six of the murders. Theron took home the Best Actress Oscar in 2004 for her transformative performance as the killer in “Monster.”

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Ralph Fiennes also played a real-life killer in his role as Amon Göth in Steven Spielberg‘s “Schindler’s List.” Göth was the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp during WWII. After the war, Göth was tried by the Supreme National Tribunal and found guilty of murdering and torturing an “unidentified” number of people. He was also found guilty of ordering the murder, torture, and imprisonment of people. Göth was executed in 1946. Fiennes received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination in 1994, although he lost to Tommy Lee Jones for “The Fugitive.”

These are two real-life examples but there are plenty of examples of performers winning or being nominated for Oscars for playing fictional killers. Kathy Bates won Best Actress for playing the killer Annie Wilkes in 1991 for “Misery.” Hopkins won in 1992 for playing the cannibal Hannibal Lecter in the aforementioned “The Silence of the Lambs.” Javier Bardem won Best Supporting Actor in 2008 for playing the murderer Anton Chigurh in “No Country For Old Men.” And the aforementioned Waltz won in 2010 for playing the murderous Nazi Hans Landa in “Inglourious Basterds” (that year, Stanley Tucci was also nominated for playing a killer — George Harvey in “The Lovely Bones”).

This year, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro portray serial killers in Martin Scorsese‘s upcoming historical epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The movie follows the real-life murders of several members of the Osage tribe in 1920s USA. There were a reported sixty (or more) murders of Osage Indians that happened between 1918 and 1931. The murders were carried out by William “King” Hale and his nephews Ernest and Bryan Burkhart after Ernest married Osage native Mollie Kile. The reason for the murders was so Hale and his conspirators could get the oil headrights of the Osage people they killed. Hale was convicted of the murder of Henry Roan in 1929 and was sentenced to life in prison. However, he was paroled in 1947 and died an old man aged 87 in 1962. There are plenty more details to go into but we’ll let you discover those for yourselves either via Google or Scorsese’s film if you wish to keep some mystery intact for the movie.

De Niro portrays Hale while DiCaprio is Ernest, Scott Shepherd is Bryan, and Lily Gladstone is Mollie. At the moment, we are predicting that De Niro and DiCaprio will both be nominated for their performances as the killers. De Niro is in pole position in our Best Supporting Actor odds chart, with Ryan Gosling (“Barbie”), Robert Downey Jr. (“Oppenheimer”), John Magaro (“Past Lives”), and Colman Domingo (“The Color Purple”) behind him. De Niro has had success in this category before — he won for “The Godfather Part II” in 1975. He was nominated in the same category in 2013 for “Silver Linings Playbook.” He also won Best Actor in 1981 for “Raging Bull” while he’s also amassed a further four more Best Actor bids in his career: “Taxi Driver” in 1977, “The Deer Hunter” in 1979, “Awakenings” in 1991, and “Cape Fear” in 1992. He was also nominated for Best Picture in 2020 as a producer on “The Irishman.” That’s two wins and eight nominations in total.

Meanwhile, DiCaprio sits at the top of our Best Actor odds chart. He’s ahead of our other predicted nominees, who are Paul Giamatti (“The Holdovers”), Domingo (“Rustin”), Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”), and Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”). DiCaprio previously won Best Actor in 2016 for “The Revenant,” while he’s received a further four nominations in this category across his career: “The Aviator” in 2005, “Blood Diamond” in 2007, “The Wolf of Wall Street” in 2014, and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” in 2020. He was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1994 (the same year Fiennes was nominated for “Schindler’s List”) for “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.” Plus, he picked up a Best Picture nomination as a producer in 2014 for “The Wolf of Wall Street,” bringing his total to one Oscar win and seven nominations in total. We expect De Niro to land his ninth bid and DiCaprio to earn his eighth. Let’s see.

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