For a lot of awards prognosticators, the race for Best Actor comes down to two names. In one corner, you have Leonardo DiCaprio, a perennial awards favorite who only nabbed his first piece of hardware over a decade ago, putting himself through the wringer for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. In the other corner, there’s Timothée Chalamet, an up-and-comer who already has acclaimed performances in blockbusters and art films. Best Picture contenders One Battle After Another and Marty Supreme gave both men opportunity to play complicated characters, all but confirming that it will all come down to DiCaprio and Chalamet.
And then on March 1, Michael B. Jordan won the Actor Award for Best Actor. Not only did Jordan’s win disrupt the two-man race, but he might have rendered it irrelevant, becoming the new front-runner for the Oscar.
At first glance, Jordan has the easier assignment in Sinners. Yes, he does play two characters, twin brothers Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore, and yes, the twins are both criminals. But the movie treats the pair as clear heroes, at least until Stack gets turned into a member of the thrall led by vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell).
Contrast that to Chalamet’s work as Marty Mauser, a mewling, selfish jerk who somehow guesses correctly that he’s at the center of a bombastic sports movie. Chalamet never apologizes for his character, and invites the audience to dislike him, even when Mauser himself is convinced that everything he does is great. Then there’s burned out revolutionary Bob Ferguson, who stumbles his way toward rescuing his daughter, with none of the cool that once made DiCaprio a teen heartthrob.
Yet, that reading overlooks the nuances that Jordan infuses into the characters to distinguish them beyond their different color schemes. As the more serious of the two, Smoke has a more stoic disposition, getting right down to business and asking the tough questions. Conversely, the good natured Stack has a less cynical nature, and is more open to what life offers him.
Different as these two personalities are, Jordan never overplays them. Instead, the differences show in subtle ways. When Smoke finds two men stealing from his truck outside a general store, he has no problem shooting them, even after identifying one as an old accomplice. But he thinks carefully before doing so, with Jordan creasing his brow and letting the sides of his mouth droop as Smoke feels a bit of sadness about his actions.
Contrast that to the openness displayed by Stack, especially when he first hears Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) play guitar. Director Ryan Coogler trains his camera off to the side of the instrument’s neck, letting us see all of Jordan’s face as Stack takes in the sounds he hears. Jordan holds Stack’s excitement for a moment before finally exploding in excitement, showing us everything we need to know about the character’s joie de vivre.
While Jordan’s technical prowess is impressive, that’s not the only element to his performance. He’s a full-on movie star in Sinners, bursting with charisma. When he swaggers into the town as Smoke and Stack, we viewers have no choice but to watch. In the second half of the movie, he makes Stack into a seductive villain and Smoke into a proper action hero, playing both sides of a classic genre flick all by himself. Just as much as Coogler’s bombastic direction, Jordan’s pure magnetism helped Sinners become a blockbuster sensation, despite the hard truths it has to tell.
Having already earned acclaim for his work in The Wire, Black Panther, and Creed, Jordan is clearly one of our most exciting actors. The Actor’s Award only proves that his technically complex but incredibly satisfying take in Sinners deserves attention. It reminded us that the Best Actor race was never just a two-man affair, and is far, far from over.
Sinners is now streaming on HBO Max.
The post The Case for Michael B. Jordan Winning Best Actor at the Oscars appeared first on Den of Geek.
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