riverotter's profile

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Saturday, January 14th, 2023 3:36 PM

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Poll Suggestion: Do Academy Voters Favor Actors who Portray Historical Characters?

Since 2001, 10 Actors who have portrayed real people who we have archival footage of have won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Of the 100 nominations for best actor since then, only 28 have been for the portrayal of a real person who had video and/or audio of them available to study, yet 10 have one. That's a 50% win rate despite real-life portrayals making up only 28% of the nominations. Is being able to imitate a real life person harder than portraying a fictional character, so it deserves to be rewarded more, or is it easy for an actor to imitate a person if they can study film and audio of that person?

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1 year ago

Please correct #1:

It is harder to recreate a real person in a convincing way than to create an original character.

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@Jessica​ I  disagree, with make-up, hair, clothes, prosthetics, etc, an actor can closely study the speech and mannerisms of a person from archival footage.

It's one step up from an impressionist on Saturday Night Live.

Not saying everyone who ever won for portraying a real person from the 20th century just did a good job of impersonating that person and it was not a great acting job, but I think imitating someone you study is no harder than coming up with an original character and losing yourself in the role, so the audience sees the character and not the actor.

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@riverotter​ 

I was giving you a correction, not my opinion. :)

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@Jessica​ duh!

I'm not the sharpest bulb in the forest

Fixed

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1 year ago

You have two different (almost competing) questions set in play.

You have the titular question. Which is ignored when you brought up the second (real question). A very bait and switch to this poll question. Maybe rewrite/simplify the title?

Minor quibble: add periods to the first and third option.

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@Tsarstepan​ I agree wholeheartedly. These are two themes are different things and one has little to do with other. 

Is being able to imitate a real life person harder than portraying a fictional character, so it deserves to be rewarded more, or is it easy for an actor to imitate a person if they can study film and audio of that person?

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1 year ago

I counted around 33 modern, real-life people out of the last 100 nominees. That is starting with 2002 releases and excluding this year's nominees.

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1 year ago

I think the premise that there is an automatic link between correlation and causation is flawed. Just because, real-life characters get more Oscars doesn't mean, they are getting rewarded more, or that role is more difficult or that the ability study film makes there performance more poweful. 

(edited)

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@urbanemovies​ I think there's something to it. I don't think it's coincidence.

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1 year ago

In my opinion, it all depends on the role how challenging it is to portray on the screen. It doesn't matter whether the character is real or fictional.

Example: This year's Best Actor category. Fraiser won over Butler. Fraiser's character was more challenging to portray with all that heavy prosthetics.

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@dibyayan_chakravorty​ and that could open a whole new can of worms: playing in prosthetics!