It's Time To Take Comedy Seriously
SERIOUSLY!
We swear to GAWD to tell the truth: this has been a long time coming
For Your Reconsideration: When Will The Oscars Respect Comedic Performances?
The Academy Award nominations were announced this week, and – surprise!! – we have thoughts. One of the reasons we’re so keen to have launched For Your Reconsideration is our long-term frustration that comedic performances aren’t accorded the same respect and awards season laurels as dramatic performances.
It’s so rare that anyone is even nominated for an Oscar for a comedic performance that when Marisa Tomei won Best Supporting Actress for her over-the-top, squawking, winsome, frankly delightful performance as Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny in 1993, it instantly became a sort of joke. One has to wonder if the ridiculous blowback that ensued after the win is a huge factor in shutting out the underrated skill of being rewatchably funny on-screen from award nominations and wins.
First, there was a hot rumor at the time that Jack Palance – a 73 year-old veteran of Westerns during Hollywood’s studio system era, who had won Best Supporting Actor the year before for a comedic performance as Curly, an ancient, wisecracking cowboy in 1992’s “City Slickers,” – had somehow been too age-addled to read the card properly, and therefore the entire Academy had just decided to let Marisa Tomei win. When that proved to not be the case (no surprise there; Palance had taken his moment the night of his win to become a 90s meme by dropping to the floor and executing one-armed pushups. He was just fine! Vigorous, even!) Tomei’s win became a sort of shorthand for “most ridiculous performance to somehow win an Oscar,” perhaps because she was a relative starlet up against a bevy of then-current and future grande dames of the cinema, including Miranda Richardson, Judy Davis, Joan Plowright, and Vanessa Redgrave.
Meanwhile, in My Cousin Vinny, Tomei had turned in a knowingly stereotypical performance of her own as a flashy, marriage-hungry1, Italian-American Jersey girl/unemployed hairdresser whose stereotype-subverting secret brilliance2 and specialized knowledge of vintage cars is crucial to the titular cousin Vinny Gambini (played by Joe Pesci) winning his big court case, which is, y’know, the central plot of the entire movie.3
Moving up to the 2010s and beyond, Olivia Colman has been a reliably delightful presence in countless movies & TV shows over the years, most often in comedic roles like the actual nightmare Godmother in Fleabag and the dim, raunchy police officer Doris in Hot Fuzz, but it’s her dramatic roles in The Favorite (as a heightened version of England’s Queen Anne) and The Lost Daughter that have garnered the most award buzz (and nominations, and wins). Jon Hamm has incredible comic timing (even in an AppleTV+ ad!) and is an expert at sending up his own absurdly good looks, but it took his role as the brooding, self-obsessed Don Draper in Mad Men to get Hollywood to take him seriously.
This is what commitment to a role looks like
Please do correct us if we’re wrong, but is Melissa McCarthy’s turn in Bridesmaids (which she brilliantly modeled after Guy Fieri?!?!?!) the most straight-up comedic Oscar-nominated performance ever? [McCarthy went on to be nominated again for Can You Ever Forgive Me – and rightly so, her performance is wonderful – but it was a Colman-esque case of “funny, but make it tragic and dramatic” situation.] Many people hoped for the Academy to similarly recognize Tiffany Haddish after she stole every possible Girls Trip scene but had to be content with her stealing the entire nominations announcement instead.
The most dramatic example of an actor being rewarded for “overcoming” a comedy background might be Mo’Nique’s 2010 Best Supporting Actress win for her role in Precious. Mo’Nique was already an incredibly successful and popular stand up comedian (here she is defending Janet Jackson right after the 2004 Super Bowl nonsense while hosting Showtime at the Apollo) and sitcom actress when she reunited with Lee Daniels to play Precious’s monstrous abuser and desperately unhappy mother, Mary. The Academy and Hollywood in general seem to love a “surprisingly” dramatic performance from someone who’s made their living making people laugh, but the love doesn’t always last. Mo’Nique has discussed at length how she was “blackballed” post-Precious for not “playing the game.” Seems like it also just might be racism, sub-category: genteel, but with a hidden stiletto?
This could have been the beginning of something!!
See also: the post-Oscar acting careers of Black “surprise” Best Supporting Oscar winners Cuba Gooding Jr. and Jennifer Hudson, who was recently snubbed for her turn in Aretha. (Side note: if you haven’t seen Hudson’s master class-level performance of “Amazing Grace” at Aretha’s funeral, now is a good time to watch: an artist at the peak of her powers honors The Queen while respectfully stepping into one of her shoes). Now that we think of it, the late and deeply lamented Chadwick Boseman had an incredible knack for playing historical figures – James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson – and was never nominated for those performances, either. (With all due respect to Sir Anthony Hopkins, we will not speak of what happened last year.) We just wonder what on Earth could be the connection? The world may never know!
For white women, the gold standard criteria of awards bait are biopic roles, and the roles requiring A Dramatic Transformation (especially if the transformation renders a conventionally very beautiful woman “unrecognizable” – fat, ugly, trashy, old, or any combination of these, perhaps best exemplified by Charlize Theron’s 2004 win for her portrayal of Aileen Wuornos in a movie straight-up called, yes, Monster). Renee Zellweger finally won the Best Actress Oscar in 2019 for her role as Judy Garland in Judy; dramatic transformations into outlandish or bigger-than-life subjects of biopics continue to be much more lucrative when it comes to Oscar noms and wins. This year’s nominations include three such performances (Jessica Chastain in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Nicole Kidman in Being The Ricardos, and Kristen Stewart in Spencer), all from movies with nary a Best Picture nomination among them. Meanwhile, The Tragedy of Macbeth garnered a bunch of nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Denzel Washington’s third nomination!), but not for any other on-screen performance, not even for three-time winner Frances McDormand, a choice which opens up more conversations about the weird inconsistency of Oscar nominations, and their frequent disconnection from filmmaking as an artistic medium.
Allison Janney may have hit the exact necessary combination for an award-winning comedic performance when she was scarcely recognizable in her portrayal of Tonya Harding’s mother LaVona Golden in I, Tonya. Her performance had comedic elements, but was ultimately pretty tragic and showcased LaVona as one of the many trials and tribulations endured by the put-upon, long misunderstood and villainized Tonya.
Janney’s example captures the vexation we feel: the best fully comedic performances can’t get no respect, even though they’re as nuanced and finely tuned as the best dramatic performances. Year in, year out, we see gifted comedic actors only being taken seriously when they get serious, and dramatic actors over-lauded for comedic performances that don’t hit the mark or that are clearly intended to be a novelty, a day trip to Funnytown, rather than a mainstay of an actor’s range. As with so many things that are both stupid and quite entrenched, this state of affairs is the result of choices made by humans. You know what we could do, though? Make other choices. It doesn’t have to be this way, and we’ll keep the porch light on for The Academy, in the continuing hope that they eventually agree that it’s time to do better.
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One of Mona Lisa Vito’s cardinal traits is her desire to get married, complete with the famous, commonly quoted line that her “biological clock is TICKING LIKE THIS” punctuated with a stomping heel. She was TWENTY SEVEN when the movie was released and her character had been engaged to Joe Pesci’s Vinny for TEN YEARS. Pesci was, naturally, 49.
PS: Shout out to this discussion that imagines a My Cousin Vinny remake in which Cardi B plays both Vinny Gambini and Mona Lisa Vito…would watch!
PPS: Let’s take a moment to appreciate Marisa Tomei’s performance as the godparent of both Tai Frasier in Clueless (RIP, sweet Brittany Murphy) and Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. Her influence!!
And there used to be such buzz around big comedies in decades past!