11 actors who have dissed the Oscars: ‘It makes me want to throw up’
For many, the awards show is regarded as the most important night in cinema. For a few, though, it’s a ‘two-hour meat parade’ that is as ‘sick-making’ as it is full of ‘mutual congragulation baloney’. From Glenda Jackson to Ethan Hawke, below are 11 stars who couldn’t care less about the prestigious statuette
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Many actors will work their whole lives to get an Oscar – or even a nomination for one. Over the years, since the award’s inception in 1929, showing off that golden statuette on your mantelpiece has become the benchmark of success for a director, performer, writer, and so on.
It’s the crème de la crème of awards shows: the most important event in the pop culture calendar. The Golden Globes could never. But not everyone feels the same. To some stars, Oscar-fêted and otherwise, the Academy Awards represents the very worst facets of the film industry: competitiveness, capitalism, and glad-handing, all of which runs completely contradictory to the art itself.
With the 96th Oscars ceremony around the corner, we’ve rounded up the A-list actors who have spoken out vehemently against the long-standing grandstanding tradition.
Bradley Cooper
Bradley Cooper is not a fan of the Oscars. Could that be due to his status as a 10-time nominee, zero-time winner? Perhaps. Will he change his tune if his Leonard Bernstein passion project nets him his first golden statuette next month? Perhaps.
The Star is Born actor-writer-director had some choice words to say about awards shows – not just the Oscars, but the whole shebang. Speaking to Hamilton star Anthony Ramos in 2020, Cooper described awards season as being “completely devoid of artistic creation”.
“It’s not why you sacrifice everything to create art,” he continued. “And yet you spend so much time being a part of it if you’re, in quotes, ‘lucky enough to be part of it.’” The only good thing about them, according to Cooper, is that “it really does make you face ego, vanity, and insecurity”. Oof. Ultimately, he says, “it’s very interesting and utterly meaningless”.
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn was blessed with a total of 12 Oscar nominations during her 66-year acting career. She won four and collected none. “As for me, prizes are nothing,” she once said. “My prize is my work.”
Hepburn’s first Oscar win was for 1933’s Morning Glory in which she played an eager actor on her journey to stardom, either flush with acclaim – or fading “like a morning glory”. Her next triumphs arrived in 1967, 1968, and 1981 with Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond, respectively. She still holds the record for the most wins for a performer. A woman of her word, Hepburn seemingly could not care less, having steered clear of all ceremonies – save for the 1974 Oscars, when she presented a lifetime achievement award to longtime collaborator Lawrence Weingarten.
Woody Allen
Woody Allen has made just one appearance on the Oscars stage. In 2002, the actor and director appeared as an ambassador for his beloved New York City months after 9/11. Beyond that, however, he has been absent from the ceremony – despite 21 nominations and three wins.
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Allen – notorious for his non-participation in the Oscars race – once said that he was unable to attend the annual event because of a standing gig playing the clarinet at a New York pub on Monday nights. He was performing at St Michael’s Pub the night he won the Oscar for writing and directing Annie Hall. A year later, he told an interviewer that the awards were meaningless to him. “When you see who wins those things – or doesn’t win them – you can see how meaningless this Oscar thing is,” Allen said.
In 2021, Hopkins, 83, made history as the oldest winning actor for his performance as a man with dementia in The Father. It was his second Academy Award, having been given his first statuette in 1991 for The Silence of the Lambs.
It was in the period between the wins, however, that Hopkins expressed his disdain for awards shows. “I can’t stand all that,” he told HuffPost in 2012, calling the glad-handing around awards season “nauseating to watch” and “disgusting to behold”.
“In a way, I’m sort of relieved that I don’t have to get embroiled in all this publicity face to face,” Hopkins said. “Because A) I can’t do it, and B) It makes no difference. You know, I’ve been around – I’ve got the Oscar myself for Silence of the Lambs – and having to be nice to people and to be charming and flirting with them ... oh, come on! People go out of their way to flatter the nominating body and I think it’s kind of disgusting. That’s always been against my nature.”
Hopkins, who was in contention for another Oscar at the time for playing Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock, didn’t hold back. “I find it nauseating to watch and I think it’s disgusting to behold. People groveling around and kissing the backsides of famous producers and all that. It makes me want to throw up, it really does. It’s sick-making,” he said. “I’ve seen it so many times. I saw it fairly recently, last year. Some great producer-mogul and everyone kisses this guy’s backside. I think, ‘What are they doing? Don’t they have any self respect?’ I wanted to say, ‘F*** off.’”
His tune may have changed in the 12 years that passed before Hopkins won again for The Father – but the actor didn’t attend the ceremony in person and wasn’t allowed to accept the prize over Zoom, according to The New York Times.
Glenda Jackson
According to two-time Best Actress winner Glenda Jackson, the Oscars are about a “whole shebang of nonsense”. It’s perhaps part of the reason why she stepped away from the silver screen and into the world of British politics instead.
Speaking about her pair of statuettes to Entertainment Weekly in 2016, the late actor said: “My mother polished them assiduously and it doesn’t take long for the gold to come off. Nothing but based metal underneath.”
Asked what goes through her head when she thinks about her Oscars, Jackson said she “jibs at the idea that I won them” – adding “I did nothing apart from what the job I was given”. She continued to say, “My sardonic view is that they’re not as important as everyone thinks they are. I never went into a film thinking, ‘Oh gosh, if I do this slightly differently, I might win something.’”
Jackson conceded that the Oscars have changed since she won for Women in Love and Sunday Bloody Sunday in the early Seventies. “The Oscars have been transformed into what they are now. They have much less to do with cinema. They are about frocks and the whole shebang of nonsense,” she said. “Nowadays, it seems like the real competition is between the different award shows. The Golden Globes, back in my day, if you won you were lucky to get a notice in the next day’s Los Angeles Times. Now the coverage is ludicrous.”
Jackson said she was “always working” on the nights of the ceremonies when she was nominated and so was unable to attend. She did, however, open the envelope one year – and was taken aback by the “potent and intense” excitement before the envelope was opened. “And you know what? The minute the envelope was opened, nobody gave a toss. ‘Right, fine, who’s next? And you know what?’”
The actor also disagreed with the idea that awarding a film an Oscar can change the world. “Prove it. See, you can’t. Who won last year? Who won the year before? Does it make one scrap of difference? At the time, it does, yes. But that’s not how human beings are,” she said. “We enjoy the glitz of the moment, which is what it is. But how can you say that 12 Years a Slave or Selma has caused a fundamental cultural shift? And then you have these Black guys being shot by policemen. Would that the Oscars could change the world but, I’m sorry, it just ain’t true.”
Katherine Ryan
In March last year, Ryan confessed that she found the Academy Awards to be a “ridiculous self-congratulatory event”.
The awards show’s only saving grace, she continued, is the element of comedy at the ceremony. “Jimmy Kimmel is an expert at the celebrity roast and the [opening monologue],” Ryan said. “I hope that that genre is never lost, because you can get all dolled up and wear your fancy gowns and hair and make-up on the red carpet. But I think always the most attractive thing from someone who has that high status is to be able to sit back at what is truly a ridiculous self-congratulatory event and have a laugh at themselves and not take themselves too seriously!”
Ryan – who was unmasked as Pigeon on last year’s Masked Singer – said she “would die” to present any of the major awards shows. Here’s hoping the “ridiculous” Oscars don’t mind a bit of good-natured ribbing themselves.
George C Scott
George C Scott hates the Oscars. In 1971, just under a decade after refusing the nomination for Best Supporting Actor, Scott “respectfully requested” that his name be removed from the ballet for Best Actor – a nod that he earned thanks to his performance in 1970’s Patton.
In the telegram he sent to the Academy, Scott wrote: “My request is in no way intended to denigrate my colleagues. Furthermore, peculiar as it may seem, I mean no offense to the Academy. I simply do not wish to be involved.” If the Academy didn’t take offense to that, then they probably would’ve taken offense to his subsequent comments calling it “a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons”.
Despite his best efforts, Scott went on to win the award for Best Actor that year – though he, of course, was not in attendance and the next day handed his award back to the Academy.
John Gielgud
An EGOT for the ages, John Gielgud could truly do it all. Across his discipline-spanning career, he netted two Oscars, three Tonys, an Emmy, and a Grammy – but if there was any inclination that winning awards translated into a respect for them, Gielgud squashed it. “I really detest all the mutual congratulation baloney and the invidious comparisons which they evoke,” he said in 1982, declining to accept his Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
Suffice to say, when Gielgud won the award – for his role as Hobson in Arthur – he did not attend the ceremony. In his letters, a collection of which were published in 2014, he confessed he had been “pleased” with the win but said that “wild horses” couldn’t drag him to the ceremony.
Oscar Isaac
Oscar Isaac let slip his not-so glowing views on the Oscars when discussing the award show’s proposed new Popular Movie category – which he called “pretty stupid” in and of itself.
“I don’t really understand it. I haven’t read the rules of. It seems pretty dumb, but I guess that’s above my pay grade,” he told USA Today. “I don’t really understand what it means. Who accepts the award? What’s the criteria for it? Is it based off box office? I don’t really get it.”
It’s at this point in the interview that the Dune star inadvertently called the whole Oscars “meaningless”. Referring to the category, which ultimately never made it to fruition, Isaac said, “The reason why people get awards and why they don’t is already a slippery slope. Another category seems a little meaningless but maybe not any more than the rest of it is.”
Ethan Hawke
It comes as little surprise that this arthouse darling isn’t a fan of the glitzy award shows. “People want to turn everything in this country into a competition,” he complained, calling the whole process “so asinine”.
Hawke also spoke out against the industry’s focus on box office figures, saying: “If you look at how many forgettable, stupid movies have won Oscars and how many mediocre performers have Oscars above their fireplace. Making a priority of chasing these fake carrots and money and dubious accolades, I think it’s really destructive.”
He back-pedalled in a later interview with The Hollywood Reporter, claiming he wasn’t bashing the awards – despite what it may have sounded like. “I think the Oscars do a very good job in representing much of the great work in a given year,” he said in 2013. “Inevitably though, many great films and performances are not recognized and can be overlooked due to the mass marketing and PR machines that march through the awards season. I don’t mean to take anything away from the genuine and deserved excitement that every nominee should feel.” His publicist also made a point to highlight to the fact Hawke’s comments were part of a wider discussion about “how an artist protects one’s craft”. Mrhmm.
Joaquin Phoenix
It took participating in the Oscars hoopla for Phoenix to know for certain that he despises it. “It was one of the most uncomfortable periods of my life,” he said, reflecting on the awards campaign he embarked on after starring in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which received several nominations in 2006.
“I never want to have that experience again,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain it – and it’s not like I’m in this place where I think I’m just above it – but I just don’t ever want to get comfortable with that part of things.” Phoenix went on to call the awards circuit the “stupidest thing in the whole world”.
Six years later, Phoenix once again found himself amid Oscars chatter with 2012’s The Master. He hadn’t changed his mind on the subject, though, arguing that the awards were “totally subjective” in how they measured acting ability. “I think it’s total, utter bulls**t, and I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t believe in it,” he stated. “It’s a carrot, but it’s the worst-tasting carrot I’ve ever tasted in my whole life. I don’t want this carrot.”
None of this, though, got in the way of Phoenix nabbing Best Actor for Joker at the 2019 ceremony – which he did attend. Accepting the prize on stage, the actor expressed his gratitude to the Academy, railed against injustice and paid tribute to his late brother, River Phoenix, in a lengthy speech. He implored people to stop fighting one another, and to adopt less of an “egocentric” world view. He also emphasised the cruelty involved in dairy farming, saying: “We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakeable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.”
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