Are we just gonna award people who are "overdue" for Oscars

Right, because "the best performance of the year" is an actually quantifiable thing.

It's all subjective. Sometimes actors win because they manage to blow people away with their work, other times they win because they are overdue veterans. It's been that way since the Oscars began ninety years ago.

The Oscars have always been this way. What's funny to me is so many people were foaming at the mouth at Oldman finally winning an Oscar and he was always rated as one of the best actors to not win the award, yet now there seems to be backlash on the internet just because of him potentially beating this Chalamet kid.

I'm weird because see I could give a fnck about Timothee Chalamet and anybody whose name isn't Gary Oldman. Go figure.

It's their award, it's their show, it's their party. That's why it's all good, but the performance is its own reward, not the Academy's affirmation of it. You can argue a performance is better and that's cool, but this year isn't about that. This year is about rewarding a singular actor, and say what you what, Gary Oldman is a singular actor for 30 years. That's enough for me......if this was a race say between Oldman and.....Keitel/Ed Harris/Fiennes - insert comparable Oscar-less actor here then .......maybe not......... but it's not.

If you really think that the best performance of the year should win, life is going to be filled with unfairness at every turn.

Enjoy the party.

Long story short, yes. That's how it's always been, and how it's always going to be. Accepting the politics of awards shows and treating them as mere sport rather than as parameters of quality saves us from getting pissed off whenever voters' opinions don't align with ours, is what I've come to learn. Like Pacinoyes said, it's just a party, just a game.

To borrow from Stephen's post, there's no objective best performance, because art critique is inherently subjective. Furthermore, whatever objectivity there might be is completely obliterated by the fact that the Academy aren't like us, casual moviegoers who watch hundreds of films each year and list what we like best fair and square; they personally know the people they're nominating, and that absolutely does factor into things. There's no way for it not to, and most of us would probably vote for our friends too if we were in their position. At the end of the day, all these awards are are popularity contests where people pick whoever they want to see have their moment in the spotlight and get a little golden statue, not necessarily who they believe had the greatest achievement in their field. That may not be how you'd vote and it only creates more injustices to be made up for further down the line, but it's just how this stuff works.

Also, you're casually ignoring the fact that for many people, Oldman's is the best performance of the year. He got raves for Darkest Hour and a fair share of mentions from critics groups, in addition to offering the kind of showy, transformative work that has a lot of people fawning themselves over. Every time I see that trailer in theaters, there's an audible reaction from the audience when "Gary Oldman is Winston Churchill" comes up, and every time there's one or two people who say out loud "THAT'S GARY OLDMAN?!". There's massive respect for him both in the industry and among regular audiences, and to be honest I think it's that appreciation for his work, both in general and in this particular film, that's made him the perceived frontrunner. By all accounts, Oldman is someone who gives no fucks about kissing ass and who's pissed off a lot of industry folks over the course of his career, which is why he's managed only one nomination in 40 years (and even that one was a very, very close call). It's not just sentimentality working in his favor.

Indeed, across the board. It's not like Oldman's getting slammed by critics in the face of Chalamet's glowing raves; he's actually leading the pack in terms of critical acclaim. Oldman's dry spell with awards bodies can be chalked up to his blacklisting post-The Contender as well as not picking particularly baity roles in the past. If Oldman had done things like Gangs of New York instead of Tiptoes, he might have been recognized more.

Oh honey, a lot of these award shows are a big yawn... Often it's about nominating the usual awards whores who will turn up and generate publicity for the event with their shameless displays of unrestrained exhibitionism. It's really all about the advertizers and networks. They should give awards to young, unknown actresses who are starting out and need the break... I mean how many f*cking awards or nominations does Meryl really need?!!!

I am so overdue! And I'm not talking my period...

DiCaprio won fair and square

THANK YOU ! 

Easy there, partner. The kid's got promise but that's a hell of a lot of hopes to hang on someone. You are right that he'll probably benefit more from a nomination than a win; peaking too early is very much a problem young actors face, and it's easy to squander that goodwill.

Chalamet fans are kind of obnoxious. Both on here and twitter.

I see your point, but they're not pointless; they exist to honor highly respected people who don't work (and therefore don't compete for Oscars) as much anymore. They're a separate beast altogether, and they still have their place.

As Huppert, Bening, Stallone, Keaton and many others (Bacall!) will tell you, an overdue narrative on its own just doesn't cut it. Oldman wouldn't be where he is if he didn't have a lot more working in his favor than simply his zero-win status. In fact, I'd say Julianne Moore's was the last real "career win", in that SPC probably wouldn't even have rushed to snap up the rights to Still Alice if they didn't have that killer platform (overdue narrative) on top of which to run a successful award campaign and subsequently market the film. (Although to be honest, even if Moore were already an Oscar winner before Still Alice, if SPC *did* for whatever reason wind up picking it up and promoting it, it's not all that unlikely that she could've won her second given how barren the category was that year...)

All eight acting winners since then have had a lot more to back up their victories than just overdue narratives. Some might point to DiCaprio and Davis, but I'd say their Oscarlessness only locked up what would've been likely anyway. They had the films (both BP nominees), the roles, the narratives and the acclaim to succeed even without an overdue net to fall back on.

Speaking of which:

I mean, who else was going to win if not him? There was no one else with his perfect storm of project + role + acclaim. The Revenant was clearly runner-up for BP, DiCaprio's massively respected by his peers, and he had a great narrative to push with how strenuous the shooting process was. It's not like he beat a well-liked alternative thanks to nothing but his overdue status, he had every single possible star align for him.

My guess is that the only way he wouldn't have won for The Revenant was if he'd won in 2013; then it might've been too soon for another victory and someone else would've hogged the buzz. But other than that, I don't think anyone would've beat him. Even if DiCaprio already had an Oscar to his name for any film up until Django, it's likely that they still would've given him his second in 2015.