The Best Actor Academy Award. Like every other Oscar category, the idea that there can only be five nominees (or less in some years) is an absurd concept and it’s easy to understand why such actors as Marlon Brando and George C. Scott eventually refused to participate in what the latter called “a goddamn meat parade.” They were clearly in the minority though because most members of the Academy are thrilled to be honored by their colleagues in this yearly competition. Still, for most of us, what constitutes great acting is a purely subjective assessment. Looking back over the years, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite shutouts in the Best Actor category – some of which are glaringly obvious, others less heralded but nonetheless deserving.     

In looking back at all of the past Best Actor winners and nominees, however, one thing becomes crystal clear. Popular taste is not the same thing as good taste. And sometimes the Oscar race turns into a popularity contest where someone receives an award because they are loved and respected by their peers or for their career achievements – and not necessarily for the performance that won. Take Spencer Tracy for instance, who was nominated for Best Actor three years in a row for San Francisco (1937), Captains Courageous (1938) and Boys Town (1939). I love Tracy’s acting in many films but am not a big fan of those three award winners. I’d would have preferred to see him nominated for Fritz Lang’s FURY (1936) over San Francisco instead. And I’d rather watch him again and again in WOMAN OF THE YEAR (1942) and ADAM’S RIB (1949) – neither of which earned him AA nominations – then have to sit through Captains Courageous or Boys Town ever again. But obviously Academy members disagree and it’s easier in hindsight to say what holds up better today than at the time. Acting styles change and popular trends in movies – costume dramas, social problem films, serial killer thrillers – come and go. And the Academy Awards are merely a reflection of their era and capture the mood and taste of the working industry’s favorites at that moment in time. This is one of the realities in a democracy; mediocrity often rises to the top when competitions are open to public voting.   

In the end, time is the best revenge. James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson might not have been nominated for THE PUBLIC ENEMY or LITTLE CAESAR, respectively, in 1930-31 but those performances are iconic now and deeply ingrained in pop/cinema culture. Yet I don’t think Lionel Barrymore’s Oscar winning Best Actor performance in A FREE SOUL for that same year has a similar resonance today. If anything it’s more interesting now as a Pre-Code look at Norma Shearer and the young, rising star Clark Gable. But I wouldn’t want to change fate and deny Barrymore his Oscar so here is my list of Best Actor omissions that would receive honorary nominations in my alternate Oscar universe.    

Charlie Chaplin got a Best Actor nomination for The Circus in the first official Oscar race of 1927-1928 but Buster Keaton never had that honor and deserved it the next year for STEAMBOAT BILL JR. (1928). He eventually received a honorary Oscar in 1960 but should have been recognized for this beautifully rendered and nostalgic slice of Americana. While Keaton was often referred to as “The Great Stone Face,” he registers a wide range of emotions here through subtle, quicksilver changes in his expression, body language and gestures. As a college educated dandy who has come home to work for his roughneck father’s failing steamboat business, he gets to play the fool and the hero, imitate other silent stars of the period (in a famous hat modeling sequence), survive a cyclone that destroys the town, and winds up winning the girl and his father’s respect.  This is the movie I always recommend to friends who want to sample silent cinema but don’t know where to start.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930) still remains one of the most powerful and affecting of all war pictures. Its unflinching depiction of death, mutilation, despair and gradual dehumanization for those on the front lines and in the trenches is tough going at times but always authentic and real. It justifiably won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars but Lew Ayres was not nominated in the Best Actor category. How could that be? His performance – he was only 22 at the time – is remarkable, going from a fresh-faced army recruit to a battle-scarred shell of man and his demise in the final scene is almost unbearable.

Even though I’m fond of Chaplin’s The Circus, mentioned above, it can’t hold a candle to his CITY LIGHTS in which the Tramp character becomes a deeper, more emotionally complex figure. It was overlooked in the 1930-31 race but that role combined his populist brand of social humor with genuine pathos and the darker realities of poverty. And the final shot in the movie never fails to move audiences.    

Warren William has appeared in and stolen many of the best Pre-Code films of the early thirties but his most impressive creation is his cunning, heartless and hard-driving boss from hell in EMPLOYEES ENTRANCE (1933). A better portrait of ruthless ambition and conquest is hard to imagine though Michael Douglas won an Oscar in a similar role in Wall Street (1987). But EMPLOYEES ENTRANCE was 54 years earlier, is still topical in its depiction of corporate downsizing, sexual harassment and other aspects of office life, and William is such a skillful, self-confident human steamroller that you can’t help but admire his almost gleeful aggression.  

Nobody thinks of Edward Arnold as a leading man today. He’s mostly known as a character actor who excels at overbearing, often villainous characters in such films as MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and MEET JOHN DOE. In fact, by the time the sound era began, the former stage actor and silent star was in his early forties and rarely considered for most leading men roles. One exception though was COME AND GET IT (1936), based on the novel by Edna Ferber and started by Howard Hawks and finished by William Wyler. Often considered Frances Farmer’s best film, it was a promising beginning for her too brief career – she plays a dual role – but Arnold as a wealthy lumberman who becomes obsessed with her is an intense and disturbing force of nature. Somehow his towering performance which moves from blustery self-confidence to jealous rage to sad resignation at being past his prime was overlooked that year but Academy favorite Walter Brennan, in the same film, won an Oscar in the supporting actor category. It’s was Brennan’s first win and he would garner three more AA noms for Best Supporting Actor but Arnold never received any honors.  

Some of Humphrey Bogart’s best performances have been shut out of the Best Actor race over the years – HIGH SIERRA, THE MALTESE FALCON, THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE – but in terms of his early roles BLACK LEGION (1936) is an overlooked gem, more varied and versatile than his more famous turn as menacing criminal Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest of the same year. I’m not sure why this Bogart portrayal is not better known or praised but it shows his range and promise in a heartwrenching tale of a blue collar family man whose self-esteem collapses when he’s overlooked for a factory promotion. His confusion and anger over his fate leads him to join a white power group (modeled on the KKK) and this unassuming B-movie programmer transforms into an American tragedy more powerful and moving than other A pictures of its day. The final look that Bogart exchanges with his wife (Erin O’Brien-Moore, also excellent) as he’s led away to jail, his life destroyed, will pierce your heart.    

It seems inconceivable that Joseph Cotten was never nominated for an Oscar in either the Best Actor or Supporting Actor category but that’s just one more reason why I rarely take the Academy Awards very seriously. You’d think he would have been recognized for his first major role in Citizen Kane (1941) or his work in Orson Welles’ follow-up at RKO, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) but nooooooooo. And it’s an outright crime that he didn’t receive a Best Actor nod for his chilling performance in Hitchcock’s SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943). Playing against his handsome, elegant screen persona, Cotten reveals a sinister perversity underneath the charm as a serial killer lying low with unsuspecting relatives in smalltown America. It’s my favorite Cotten performance along with his iconic role in THE THIRD MAN (1950), yet another magnificent portrayal ignored by the Academy.

In a just world, James Edwards, would have been the first African-American actor to receive a Best Actor nomination for HOME OF THE BRAVE if race and skin color were not an issue in Hollywood or America in 1949. But it was and Edwards’ sensitive and quietly commanding performance as the sole Black soldier in a white combat unit stationed in the Pacific in WWII went unrecognized by the Academy. But, in some ways, you can see why. Despite its low budget and occasional tendency to overstate its liberal views (this was a Stanley Kramer production, after all), the film also doesn’t pull any punches in its depiction of Edwards’ world and the racism he is subjected to as a matter of course, some of it casual and unintentional, most of it hurtful and confrontational.  Eventually it has a crippling effect on him and part of the film is an attempt to explore his wounded psyche. Edwards’ anguish and pain feel real, so real that it was bound to make audiences uncomfortable at the time, but it’s a breakthrough performance and should have been honored. To learn more about this often overlooked actor see Moira’s fine profile on him at http://moviemorlocks.com/2007/10/17/james-edwards-someone-must-make-a-stand/    

After a career of playing boy-next-door types and the equivalent of a male ingenue, Robert Walker broke out of his romantic leading man mode and surprised everyone with his irresistibly witty yet demonic psychopath in Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951). Is there a more perfectly realized portrayal of sophisticated evil that is also irreverently funny in the annals of cinema? Unfortunately, it didn’t garner a AA nod and Walker would die unexpectedly that same year, before completing his work on MY SON JOHN (it was finished posthumously using footage of Walker from the Hitchcock film for the final scenes).

I’ll cover Tom Ewell in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955), James Mason in BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956) and other major AA omissions in Part Two.