Oscar nominations for playing real people: Why is this year’s group so small?

Matthew Stewart
·4 min read
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Since the enormous popularity surrounding Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe has never waned in the seven decades since they both rocketed to superstardom, it’s no wonder that Austin Butler and Ana de Armas sailed to Oscar nominations for portraying them in the 2022 films “Elvis” and “Blonde.” What is odd, however, is that the respective Best Actor and Best Actress hopefuls are the only ones nominated in any of this year’s acting categories for playing real people. While this 90 percent fictional character rate is far from unprecedented, it does stand in stark contrast to the preceding decade’s average of 59 percent and thus raises questions as to why academy voters chose to veer in the opposite direction.

The last instance of two or fewer portrayals of real people leading to Oscar nominations in the same year involved 2003 Best Actress champ Charlize Theron, whose “Monster” character, Aileen Wuornos, stood completely alone in a sea of otherwise fictional ones. In the last nine years, there was at least one biographical nominee in each of the four categories, but both of the current supporting lineups have broken that trend. The last group to prevent this uniformity was the 2012 Best Actress lineup, led by winner Jennifer Lawrence (“Silver Linings Playbook”).

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The last 100 percent fictional character rate applied to the 1979 nominees. There were a few close calls that year, however, since the characters played by Best Actress winner Sally Field (“Norma Rae”) and lead nominees Bette Midler (“The Rose”) and Roy Scheider (“All That Jazz”) were loosely based on real-life figures Crystal Lee Sutton, Janis Joplin and Bob Fosse, respectively. The only other film years that have produced zero biographical nominations are 1961, 1959, 1957, 1954, 1949, 1931-32, 1930-31 and 1927-28. 1959 is a special case since “The Diary of Anne Frank” nominees Shelley Winters and Ed Wynn played pseudonymous characters instead of expressly embodying Auguste van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer.

SEE Austin Butler and Brendan Fraser are neck and neck in Oscar odds after they split BAFTA and SAG

It bears mentioning that, although their characters in “The Fabelmans” serve as representations of writer-director Steven Spielberg’s own mother and great uncle, the fact that Mitzi Fabelman and Boris Podgorny did not exist keeps current lead and supporting nominees Michelle Williams and Judd Hirsch out of the biographical performance club. In recent years, the same stipulation has applied to “Minari” (2020) actors Steven Yeun and Yuh-jung Youn, and “American Hustle” (2013) quartet Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Lawrence.

The record for most biographical nominations in a single year was set at 12 by the 2015 contenders and then matched by those from 2018. These were also the two most recent years in which three actors won for playing real people, with the former trio being made up of Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass (“The Revenant”), Mark Rylance as Rudolf Abel (“Bridge of Spies”) and Alicia Vikander as Gerda Wegener (“The Danish Girl”), and the latter consisting of Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury (“Bohemian Rhapsody”), Olivia Colman as Queen Anne (“The Favourite”) and Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley (“Green Book”).

Last year, a total of nine actors earned Oscar nominations for playing real people, resulting in two lead wins for Will Smith as Richard Williams in “King Richard” and Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” Butler and de Armas can take comfort in the fact that, except for 2016, every film year since 1997 has produced at least one Oscar-winning biographical performance. Other recent examples include supporting victor Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton in 2021’s “Judas and the Black Messiah” and lead champ Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland in 2019’s “Judy.”

Perhaps the main reason for this sharp drop in real-person portrayal nominations is that the academy had relatively limited options this year. Some of the realistic possibilities — such as Naomi Ackie as Whitney Houston in “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and Carey Mulligan as Megan Twohey in “She Said” — were considered long shots as the nominations date closed in, but the Oscars even ignored strong contenders like Danielle Deadwyler as Mamie Till-Mobley in “Till” and Eddie Redmayne as Charlie Cullen in “The Good Nurse.” It’s hard to know what made voters gravitate much more heavily toward fictional characters this year, but only time will tell if this is the beginning of a new trend.

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