Oscars 2021: Anthony Hopkins Win shows the danger of relying on predictions

To be clear, Hopkins was not below the Oscar. One of the greatest actors of his generation, Hopkins delves into all of his characters on a granular level, and in Florian Zeller The father, he gave a truly haunting interpretation of a man enduring the waking nightmare of dementia; his essay on how one loses his understanding of reality and the world around him is devastating.

However, it’s hard not to suspect that in breaking with nine decades of tradition, Oscar producers were counting on Boseman to win the Best Actor award – as he had done at every other major award ceremony. of awards this year, minus Hopkins’ BAFTA victory, with the British Academy Film Awards often favoring British talent. Boseman’s posthumously winning Oscar would also have provided an excellent, albeit bittersweet, ending to what was billed as an intimate Hollywood story. The industry bids farewell to a formidable talent who was taken far, far too soon.

One imagines, like so many Oscar prognosticators (myself included), that the producers looked at the numbers and assumed the Academy would do like the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and Screen Actors Guild before them and recognize the beautiful. and Boseman’s monumental talent with that one. and the one performance he could ever win for.

So the Oscars telecast didn’t end NomadlandThe raucous (and joyous) win for Best Picture, but with Boseman’s final farewell turned down, and a living winner who couldn’t even make it to the ceremony, likely due to travel in old age during a pandemic.

It gave the Oscars a bitter aftertaste and a feeling of disappointment. The irony is that it doesn’t need to close that way. While there is probably a lot to be said about why Boseman’s heartbreaking performance as a black musician in the 1920s was used and abused by white business owners lost to an old favorite, Hopkins is as raw in a lap that many consider the best of his career – and one that’s almost 30 years since his last Oscar win for Thesilenceofthelambs.

But the way this category played out will frustrate many, many, and it will act as the night’s denouement reframe an evening that saw an extremely diverse field of Oscar winners across the categories, including Daniel Kaluuya in Best. supporting role for Judas and the Black Messiah, Youn Yuh-jung for Best Supporting Actress for Threateningand Chloé Zhao in the Best Director category for Nomadland. Same NomadlandThe victories for Best Picture and Best Director are the recognition of a film with perhaps the strongest anti-capitalist sentiments since Grapes of Wrath (which won Director, Not Picture, in 1941).