Chadwick Boseman Could Win a Posthumous Academy Award
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Awards watchers will be paying particular attention to the Academy Awards on April 25. If the late Chadwick Boseman, who is nominated in the Best Actor category for his role in Ma’ Rainey’s Black Bottom, wins, he will become the first person to receive both this award and a Golden Globe posthumously since Peter Finch won both for his portrayal of Howard Beale in 1976’s Network.
The Academy and the Golden Globes are not the only award organizations to highlight Boseman’s performance. Since last December, when Netflix released the George C. Wolfe–directed adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play, Boseman has been nominated for more by more than 25 international, national, and regional groups, and he has won top awards from the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Gotham Award, the Critic’s Choice Award, and the NAACP Image Awards. Boseman’s wife, Simone Ledward Boseman, has accepted many of the honors on his behalf, including the Golden Globe and NAACP awards. At the latter ceremony, she spoke about the importance of cancer screening and encouraged the audience to visit the website of Stand Up To Cancer.
The actor died last year in August, at the age of 43, four years after he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He continued to work throughout his illness and has received multiple nominations for another 2020 film in which he starred, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods.
A posthumous win at the Oscars will offer tribute to one of the actor’s most riveting performances, but it will also serve as an endnote to a career which was cut terribly short. Boseman studied acting at Howard University and landed significant film and television parts throughout his early career, including a breakout portrayal of Jackie Robinson in 42. But he rose to international fame with his leading role in 2018’s Black Panther, one of the highest grossing films of all time. Boseman had just begun to use that fame to pursue challenging new acting roles and screenwriting projects when he died.
He joins a small list of actors to receive nominations after their death. James Dean, who was 24 when he died in a car crash in 1955, was nominated for Academy Awards in the Best Actor category for East of Eden in 1955 and Giant in 1956. Heath Ledger was nominated and won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight in 2008. Massimo Troisi won a Best Actor Oscar for Il Postino in 1995, and Spencer Tracy 1967 won a Golden Globe and Oscar in 1967 for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Peter Finch’s awards for his portrayal of the unhinged newscaster Howard Beale in Network similarly acknowledged a career defining performance. But they also recognized a return to form for a widely admired actor who had weathered a few box office and critical disappointments. Finch was 60 when he died of a heart attack and had only begun making promotional appearances for Network. His line from the film, “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore,” is as upsetting and relatable today as it was when he uttered it 45 years ago.
In December, members of the creative team that made Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, including Wolfe and star Viola Davis, spoke to the New York Time’s Reggie Ugwu about working on the film with Boseman, “There was a transcendence about Chad’s performance, but there needed to be,” Davis told Ugwu. “[Boseman has] got to sort of go to the edge of hope and death and life in order to make that character work. Of course, you look back on it and see that that’s where he was.”
Earlier this week, Netflix announced it would release a new documentary about the actor Chadwick Boseman: Portrait of an Artist, which debuts on April 17, will feature interviews with some of the artists with whom Boseman worked over the years, among them Phylicia Rashad, Denzel Washington, Branford Marsalis, and Spike Lee.
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