Best Supporting Actor (2000)
Michael Caine, The Cider House Rules
Tom Cruise, Magnolia
Michael Clarke Duncan, The Green Mile
Jude Law, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Haley Joel Osment, The Sixth Sense
Oh, you thought we were only doing modern day nominations?
Free your mind, children, and the rest will follow.
Since more than a few of this years batch of nominees is a little, um, shall we say, ho hum, I thought we’d look back at a race that—in hindsight—was a total knockout with a surprise twist.
First off, gaze at that list of performances.
With all due respect to the great Michael Caine, I would argue that this is one of those rare times in Oscar history where the least deserving person in the category won.
I mean, without question, Caine is doing the least interesting work of anybody in that field, and that field includes Tom Cruise, so you really do have to think, don’t you?
Two reasons for how Caine pulled this one out—
All the other incredible performances cancelled each other out.
The voters went with the safe bet.
Leading up to the awards, some were speculating that Caine could pull it out as a sentimental favorite even though he had already won for Hannah and Her Sisters, but should have been banned from ever being nominated again since he skipped the ceremony to continue filming Jaws 3D.
In fact, when he won and got up to the podium, he asked “Dick” for some extra time since it was his first time winning on-air.
He must have thought Dick Clark was producing the Oscars or that he was at the Golden Globes. The man was clearly very moved by the win, and that makes it easier to swallow. Clark was also producing nearly everything back then, so it’s an honest mistake.
Though I don’t think Caine deserved the win, I will say that his speech is one of the most gracious you’ll ever see from a winner. He uses his time to go through his list of nominees and not just mention their names, but speak on their talent and the caliber of their performances, allowing for each nominee in the category to get a round of applause from the audience.
You can see that while all the men are touched by this gesture, the newcomers at the time (Law, Duncan, and Osment) are also gobsmacked that Michael Caine even knows who they are.
While I would tell you to go back and look at the speech—
—There are parts that catch in your throat not for how badly they’ve aged, but how they remind us that, yikes, 2000 really was that long ago. The emotional wallop caused me to tear up watching it even before I understood why.
As Caine cracks a joke about how if Tom Cruise had won, his price would have gone down because supporting actors get paid less, I thought about the career Cruise was pursuing at that point. He was on his way to becoming a capital-A “Actor” and not just an action star. I can’t imagine Cruise starring in a film like Magnolia today, nor could I imagine any director giving him that role. Magnolia ended an arc that began with Jerry Maguire and ended with Vanilla Sky. Some people say the couch-jumping was what turned Cruise into a strictly popcorn performer, but I think it was that Cameron Crowe misfire.
Cruise is sitting there as Caine lightly roasts him thinking, It doesn’t matter. I’ve been nominated twice before and I’ll be up there soon enough now that I’m no longer just thought of as the pretty face. I only wish that had come to pass.
The call-out to Michael Clarke Duncan may hit the hardest since he’s the only one in the group no longer with us. Go back and watch The Green Mile and marvel at what that man does with a role that could so easily go off the rails. He strong-arms it with sheer, raw vulnerability and tenderness. The star he should have become versus the way he was relegated to supporting roles (or less) for the rest of his career is a testament to how myopic Hollywood could be towards actors of color even after a performance as celebrated as this one.
Similar to the Cruise trajectory, Caine’s prophesy that Jude Law would “be a big star no matter what happens” was true. Law might also be the second-weakest link in the category after Caine himself since his performance in The Talented Mr. Ripley is really nothing more than unbridled charisma and sex appeal. I’m not sure an actor could snag a nomination as easily these days for what is essentially pure star power, but having watched Ripley again recently, My goodness, did Law have an excess of it. Like Cruise, it seemed certain that he’d wind up on the Oscar stage at some point.
Instead, he became overused—at one point starring in five big films in one year. Hollywood even cast him in a remake of Caine’s most famous role—Alfie. None of those films clicked, and each one only showcased that the movies didn’t want to expand on what Law had done in his break-out performance, but rather, capitalize on his good looks. The closest he came to achieving some semblance of artistic merit was in Cold Mountain, but now he dons wizarding garb and cashes large checks for them, I’m sure. Maybe he came around years too late. I almost wonder if he would have had a more interesting career during a less interesting time. Throw him back a few decades and let Hitchcock or Wilder get ahold of him. Let him go toe-to-toe with Cary Grant and Roger Moore.
Instead, he’s Dumbledore.
Oh well.
Finally, we get to the person that, at the time, would have seemed like the obvious winner.
If you think you have some idea of how big The Sixth Sense back during the film Renaissance of the late 90’s/early 2000’s, I can assure you—
It was bigger.
(We won’t get into how Toni Collette should have won over Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted. We will one day, but not today.)
Osment was at the forefront of the movie and was responsible for uttering one of the most famous lines in cinema history. Looking back, it really feels like he should have been the one who took home the trophy.
That being said, I have a hard time crediting child actors for their work. It’s not because I don’t think there are good ones and bad ones. I just think that it’s hard to tell until the young performers grow up how much of what they were doing in their early work was the result of innate skill and how much was just…luck.
In the case of Osment, we wouldn’t get an answer to that question until much, much later. Just as Cruise was derailed by Vanilla Sky and Law was taken down by a series of flops, Osment was in a movie that was a career worst for just about everyone involved with it.
You wouldn’t remember it now, but back when it came out, Pay It Forward was looked at as the definition of a movie trying to be an award-contender and crushing itself under its own weight. The hype leading up to it suggested that it was going to secure trophies for Osment, Helen Hunt, and Kevin Spacey as they were all coming into it at their absolute peaks.
Instead, the film is probably best known for taking the My Girl approach and traumatizing everyone who saw it by killing off Osment’s character in the finale.
(Is that a spoiler alert? Were any of you actually going to go back and watch Pay It Forward? God, I hope not.)
We never saw much of Osment after that, which is a shame, since I think his performance in A.I. (and that film, in general) is worth talking about and highly underrated.
He’s since reappeared and can’t seem to shake off that Wow-look-who’s-all-grown-up fixation that people have when a child actor comes back to the profession later in life. Of course, he also hasn’t appeared in the tabloids, run anyone over with his car, or made a cameo in a mugshot, so I guess we shouldn’t act like a career downturn is the worst thing that can happen to a person.
For my money, I wouldn’t give him the Oscar anyway. I can’t get past my child actor bias, but even with that intact, I’ll still argue that Cruise should have walked away with the Oscar for what is a searing performance where an actor uses what made him famous to lure you in and then tosses it out to show you everything else he’s had all along and has never gotten a chance to show.
It’s been over twenty years and I still think of him kneeling at his father’s bedside every time I see a poster for another Mission: Impossible movie.
Would winning the Oscar have kept him on the right path?
Who’s to say?
Caine kept working steadily after he won, but if The Cider House Rules looked like a walk in the park for him, everything else he did after that was a crawl along the carpet. He had always been something of a check-casher, and I guess when you’re getting on in years in a notoriously vain industry, you have to take what you can get, but it doesn’t make looking back at his win any less disappointing.
Then again, maybe I’m adding the disappointment.
Because look at what the movies used to be and do.
They’re still my favorite thing to talk about, but wow, those five performances from those five actors.
Will we ever see anything like that again?