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I was watching A Beautiful Mind recently, and it came to me that he was considered the front runner for Best Actor in 2001/2002, the award eventually went to Denzel but Crowe won many precursors including the Critics Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG – setting up for a clean sweep. Additionally he was nominated for three years consecutively and seemed poised to pull a Tom Hanks for back to back consecutive wins in the Best Actor category.
This leads me to his altercations, violent outbursts and associated controversies from 1999 to 2005, all of which seem to have cost him greatly over the years on the award circuit. The most notable of the four incidents is the one at BAFTA in which he reportedly did the following:
Last week, the bearded star pinned the TV producer against a wall, launched into a verbal tirade and declared that Gerrie would “never work in Hollywood”, after the BBC cut part of Crowe’s speech from the Bafta broadcast.
Quote from the Guardian.
After his nomination for a Beautiful Mind he hasn’t been nominated since. Even for baity work such as Cinderella Man, Les Miserables, American Gangster and Master & Commander – all which had at least some level of critical acclaim and award buy in.
My question is could Crowe have been a Daniel Day Lewis by now, or was he always destined for only one or two victories at max?
ReplyInteresting question.
I think he’d have maxed out at 5 nominations and 2 wins. He might have happened as a nomination for Cinderella Man if not for the phone throwing incident. But he was never happening for American Gangster (Denzel got the stronger reviews, and even he couldn’t happen) and his reviews for Les Miserables were actually quite poor. So many reviews said he basically couldn’t sing.
He fell off pretty badly since 2007. Can’t really see any situation where he’d really even be nominated for. DDL probably has the right idea not to work too much, if Crowe’s trajectory is anything to go by.
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This post was found to be inappropriate by the moderators and has been removed.I think perhaps he could’ve won for A Beautiful Mind, but I’m not sure about other nominations. A Master & Commander nomination might’ve been possible, but Johnny Depp was also in the mix for Pirates of the Caribbean that year and I doubt they would’ve nominated two ship captain performances.
I suppose I don’t have to worry about his presence in Boy Erased hurting the film’s chances; Les Miserables scored plenty of nominations and wins despite him.
ReplyCopy URLPeople talk as if he’s been blacklisted or something. He’s been in a Superman film, a Mummy film that was supposed to start a huge franchise, Miserables, Gangster, Master and Commander and Cinderella Man, among othets. Huge projects that a blacklisted or even an actor people don’t like so much would have never gotten.
He maybe would’ve won for Beautiful Mind. It’s pretty much the only result that changed from that incident. Just two years later he was back with a 10 time nominated film for which he was probably 6th or 7th in line for Best Actor.
He hasn’t done anything worthy since except maybe Cinderella Man. But that’s not a bad thing or a direct result of the incident. Even behaved people just never get nominated again. What was Tom Hanks’ cellphone incident?
ReplyCopy URLI don’t think he has been blacklisted – I merely wanted to have a discussion surrounding what effect (if any) his incidents had on his award potential. Looking objectively, it looks like at the very least it cost him Best Actor in 2002 if you review the precursors. It also stands to reason that it seems to have cost him again in other races, as he has again never been nominated for any other work that seemed to have buzz and award potential.
Ultimately that what I wanted to discuss, if these incidents were key in him seemingly never being nominated ever again for his work, even when there seemed to be support for them.
With Tom Hanks it seems like he has just been naturally aged out of the nomination process by the Academy. There’s no clear reason as to why, with Russel there does seem to be a reason for why the Academy doesn’t want to nominate him any longer.
ReplyCopy URLI don’t think he has been blacklisted – I merely wanted to have a discussion surrounding what effect (if any) his incidents had on his award potential. Looking objectively, it looks like at the very least it cost him Best Actor in 2002 if you review the precursors. It also stands to reason that it seems to have cost him again in other races, as he has again never been nominated for any other work that seemed to have buzz and award potential.
Ultimately that what I wanted to discuss, if these incidents were key in him seemingly never being nominated ever again for his work, even when there seemed to be support for them.
With Tom Hanks it seems like he has just been naturally aged out of the nomination process by the Academy. There’s no clear reason as to why, with Russel there does seem to be a reason for why the Academy doesn’t want to nominate him any longer.
If Crowe had actually done something people were really passionate about after Cinderella Man, I think he’d have been more than capable of being nominated. Yes, he threw a phone at someone, but incidents like that get forgotten pretty quickly. Sean Penn was beating up photographers and doing jail time for assualt when he was younger, and he ended up winning 2 oscars. I honestly think Cinderella Man is the only possible nomination he lost out on due to his behavior. It would have been forgotten about the next time he gave a performance that they really loved.
Crowe simply hasn’t had a performance that’s had enough passion behind it for a long time. And he’s made a lot of films. He’s very quickly gone from superstar leading man to almost a competent journeyman character actor. His performance reviews seemed to have gotten a lot weaker over the years as well. I mean, he’s just been nominated for a Razzie for The Mummy.
His best recieved performance in years was for The Nice Guys, and even then Ryan Gosling got better reviews. Crowe is just a classic example of a guy who had an excellent peak period, but sort of misplaced his mojo and has yet to recover it. He’s adds value as a name to a project, but no one gets particularly excited by his acting anymore. If he wants to get nominated again, he needs to dig deeper and give a performance people can’t ignore.
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This post was found to be inappropriate by the moderators and has been removed.I think he was vulnerable to losing the Beautiful Mind Oscar even without BAFTA. He had just won the year before, Denzel had never won a Best Actor, and there was the whole historical aspect of awarding Halle Berry and Denzel together.
Then again, Russell Crowe was starring in the Best Picture winner of 2001 and was playing the kind of character that typically wins acting awards. Though it does seem odd that Denzel Washington managed to take down the presumed frontrunner that year due to Crowe’s bad temper at BAFTA while he couldn’t have done the same thing in 2016 when Casey Affleck won, despite having worse things going against him.
I know Amanda Spears has this theory that “only American actors win two years in a row. In order for non-Americans to win consecutive Oscars like Luise Rainer, they need U.S. citizenship.” Which if you ask me is just a coincidence. As we’ve seen in recent years, the Academy doesn’t seem to have a problem with awarding non-American directors without U.S. citizenship (like Alejandro González Iñárritu) two years in a row. I’d say the closest Russell Crowe came for nominations since 2001 were for Master & Commander (which was contending for Best Picture in 2003) and Cinderella Man (which he probably suffered from the film’s early release date, its underperformance at the box office, and his telephone incident).
ReplyCopy URLLikability may matter less for men than it does women. But it still matters when you have competitors for your position in the business. Is Clooney really a better actor than Crowe?
Interesting question, actually.
But I, honestly, think Clooney has a much better screen presence and more depth to his characters than Crowe does. Range isn’t Clooney’s strongsuit, but range isn’t everything…
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