Denzel Washington Defeats Russell Crowe | Best Actor Oscar 2002 

Al Pacino was better

⁠​⁠@@carlosalonsoperezsosa8162 Nah Denzel performance in Malcom X was way better. Pacino should have won for the Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon instead

​@@shawncarter5434no, not at all. Pacino did convince me as a blind guy.

Yes, a great nomination! Thanks for watching!

Animated films should get screenplay nominations more often, but don’t know if Shrek deserved one.

It was off a book so yeah the same thing happened when toy story was nominated for an oscar in 1996 for best adapted screenplay. For the short film tim toy .

For me personally, I think it’s stupid that both Shrek and The Lord of the Rings the Fellowship of the Ring lost Adapted Screenplay Oscar to A Beautiful Mind. Goes to show that the Academy prefers rewarding a typical Oscar bait biopic than an animated film or fantasy film in that category.

The “Shrek” script is super clever. Kudos to the academy for recognizing that. “A Beautiful Mind” won though.

He’s so great in Malcolm X. Thanks for watching!

Agreed!

Nope, it's the Insider

Yep, Crowd’s win is for the wrong movie, but that happens all the time. Thanks for watching!

If Tom Hanks defeated Russel Crowe the year before, maybe Russell Crowe would’ve won for A Beautiful Mind.

I know!! Thanks for watching!

Hold kevin, no one can beat kevin spacey's performance.

I thought Denzel in The Hurricane was still good but one of his weaker, more typical performances.

YES, it was such a memorable ceremony! Thanks for watching!

@@TheAwardsContender Thank you for the content

Yes, this is so true. He was not nominated for a BAFTA for his recent work in The Tragedy of Macbeth, although he made into the shortlist. I’ve thought the BAFTAs would eat it up since it’s a Shakespearean adaptation, but nope. There are also conspiracies and theories that the BAFTAs don’t like Denzel simply because they obviously prefer the Black Brits, and there are even accusations that the recent influx of Black British actors taking over Hollywood alarm some Hollywood insiders, especially the likes of Denzel, Morgan Freeman (who also doesn’t have a BAFTA nom), Samuel L. Jackson, etc.

@@kareninacarado This is an interesting theory that I’ll look into. I know there has been discussion about black brits playing American historical figures and some of the ignorance that comes with that. I have heard black American actors call this out and it is strange that Denzel was never even at least nominated.

Excellent point! Thanks for watching!

He was rewarded for Malcolm X, the movie he should have won for.

That means he knew Russel beat him

​@@English_MoFowhat do you mean by that ?

Or......maybe these are just theories.

Al Pacino had no chance whatsoever to win for Godfather Part II. He had no momentum whatsoever during that awards season. It's just revisionist history to think he could have won. And Pacino swept the season so it was almost impossible for Denzel to win.

So true! Thanks for watching!

Not to mention that since Frances McDormand won in a Best Picture winner, it screwed over Carey Mulligan’s Oscar victory for Promising Young Woman, who I think should have won.

Actually, Al Pacino didn’t sweep for Scent of a Woman considering Robert Downey Jr. won a BAFTA for Chaplin that year. Of course Denzel Washington wasn’t nominated for the BAFTA that year considering he was never nominated for the BAFTAs once. He’s hated by the BAFTAs as much as the Oscars hated Jim Carrey.

Yes, I would love to do that video down the road! Either about that race specifically or a more general look at Al Pacino's road to winning his first Oscar. Thanks for watching!

Thanks so much for watching!

I think Michael Mann makes his movies fully knowing they will be pretty love it or hate it.

Thanks for watching!!

Thank you, Kevin!! Your comment made my day!

Agreed!! Thanks for watching!

@@TheAwardsContender great video xoxo

Yes, it’s one of my favorites, too! Those were the days. Thanks for watching!

Very true. Thanks for watching!

Great point!! Would have loved Davis winning for Ma Rainey!

@@TheAwardsContender Thanks for the great video. I agree with Rich, Viola Davis would have been my pick for 2021, I'm surprised they didn't go that route. I thought they were going to do it to mitigate the backlash from Chadwick Boseman losing to Hopkins (where Hopkins for the Father was so deserving no doubt). Viola already had enough love from winning SAG, that win from McDormand was just unexplaineable to me. Maybe it's too early since it's only from 2021 but perhaps you can make a video about that unpredictable Best Actress race of 2021.

@@christofferdharma9535 I disagree most black actresses especially could’ve won best actress but many of them were nominated but didn’t win like Gabrielle sidibe for precious in 2010, viola Davis for the help in 2012 and fences in 2017 (she had no business winning supporting) or those were weren’t nominated like lupita Nyong’o for us in 2020, Taylor Paige for Zola in 2022 and mya Taylor in tangerine in 2016 the Oscars have a way of picking and choosing which actress of color can be nominated and win certain awards

I think part of the problem is that black women weren't getting the "Oscar" roles for lead actress. They're good for getting supporting actress awards but it's crazy that only one POC has ever won lead actress Oscar. Viola should have won one for lead actress by now.

For me personally, Carey Mulligan should have won in Promising Young Woman. Although, I think Viola Davis delivered a much better performance in Ma Rainey than Frances McDormand in Nomadland. I think that Oscar win is so undeserved. I also, think she shouldn’t have won in Three Billboards either. I think Sally Hawkins from The Shape of Water was so much better than her. The only Oscar I think Frances McDormand deserved was her first Oscar win for Fargo.

But he got snubbed big times

Denzel shouldn't have passed on Da 5 Bloods. He would have definitely been nominated at least.

That would be awesome!!

Yay! Thanks for watching!

Agreed! Thanks for watching!

Interesting perspective! Thanks for watching!

I also think it came down to Crowe won before, than his behaviar at the baftas and then berry was more and more a sure thing after the sag and poitier was also a recipient. Its all abiut to makr a statement and washingtom was so overdue for a lead oscar win, that he became the victory.

How could they possibly know Halle was going to win? I'm black & proud indeed of her great historic win.. nevertheless, in my most impartial judgement Sissy Spacek's gutwrenching agony in In The Bedroom had no peer& that goes for a few years before & after...the shock Halle experienced was real because she had to know that Sissy's performance was on a par with the finest Greek tragedy. I was so depressed ...it me a few months to be able to watch it again...very few performances have moved me as deeply as hers did

@@ChrolliForever Overdue? Thelma Ritter, Deborah Kerr & especially Glenn Close...that's overdue!!

It was a really strong year for performances.

Thank you so much, your comment made my day!

He’s excellent in Training Day. Thanks for watching!

Yes, love this! Thanks for your thorough comment, much appreciated.

Yeah a big part of the love for and being impressed by Washington in Training Day was he was so good but also so different from his typical roles.

I completely agree with you. Denzel’s should have two lead Oscars for “Malcolm X” and “Hurricane.”

You don't win for your best work. You win if you give the best performance in a calendar year. It's very possible for an actor's worst performance to be the best performance of the year.

@@richierich7229 That's a take.

That’s somewhat true. I believe you’re speaking about the past 20 - 25 years? Go back to 1936 when Davis won for “Dangeous” when she herself had said Hepburn gave the best performance in “Alice Adams.” Everyone knew Davis won because she wasn’t even nominated the year before for “Of Human Bondage.” Very valid point though.

Thanks for watching!

Wilkinson is amazing in that film!

I will! Stay tuned!

Thanks for watching!

It was very significant

Agreed! Thanks for watching!

Would be a fascinating video! Down the road for sure!

Excellent points! Thanks for watching!

Love Jim Broadbent but disliked him in Moulin Rouge.

Oh, we’ll get there. Stay tuned!

@@TheAwardsContender Great, I’m looking forward to it!

@@TheAwardsContender Great! I can always count on you for the great Oscar analyses I crave.

I loved Meryl Streep’s performance in Julie and Julia more. She became Julia Child in that film. I think Sandra Bullock should have won in Gravity instead of The Blind Side.

@@laurajones1773 i think the reason why meryl didnt win is that her performance in julie and julia is considered her weakest based on her solid filmography despite it was the best performance at the oscar that year.

Thanks for watching!

Such a great video. She’s the best of the best!

@@TheAwardsContender I completely understand and respect why she refuses to talk about men on her channel and even back that decision. So I’m happy we not have your page for that additional content

Yep!!

Thank you so much! Glad you liked it!

Yes, that video is coming! Stay tuned.

Interesting perspective. Thanks for watching!

Coda winning best picture and Belfast winning screenplay are recent examples of how political atmosphere of the world and the country shaped the race

I think he will. Just need to be patient.

Thank you for watching!!

Yes, a big factor was he’d already won two Best Oscar Oscars. Thanks for watching!

For me personally, I find it weird that Frances McDormand won a third Oscar so soon after her second Oscar win in an okay performance in Nomadland but not rewarding Tom Hanks’ his third for his best performance in Cast Away.

Yes, agreed!!

Yep!

Thanks for watching!

But winning a SAG award does give you momentum.

Great picks! Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching!

Yes, agreed! Thanks for watching!

Thanks for your thorough comment!! You’re the best!

Stop its all just theories. Washington won because he's the much better actor and gave the better performance. Which is why his performance is still talked about in training day while nobody even mentions or remembers a beautiful mind. Its part of that corny era where a big celeb would play a mentally challenged to win an oscar. Not unlike this current era where stars "method" act to hopefully win Oscars. Denzel's Alonzo Harris has become synonymous with crooked cop roles. Totally reinventing the undercover cop genre. Also lord of the rings should have won over A beautiful mind.

@@mania4270 I will admit that Washington is the better actor, but Crowe's role in ABM had much more range and he had to do more in that role. He played a character over multiple decades, from him as a genius mathematician, to someone suffering from schizophrenia and how someone interacts with people in good ways and bad. We all have different opinions and I personally got more from Crowe's performance.

@@mania4270 The Academy Awards are very rarely about who is “the best actor” in the general sense - that question is actually entirely irrelevant when presented with five specific performances to choose between. If they were supposed to give acting awards based on the performer’s general reputation, history, and body of work, they wouldn’t be nominated for specific films. A great example is just this year - if they cared about which of the five men nominated for Lead Actor was “the best actor” in the general sense, Will Smith simply would not have won. He won because they voted for the performance that stood out to them the most - not because they hold him up as being an implicitly “better actor” than Denzel/Javier/Benedict/Andrew. I agree with your characterization of A Beautiful Mind, it’s aged extremely poorly - as one of many poorly-conceived vehicles for a big-name star to show off their talent by playing a disabled person for some clout. (I Am Sam and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape are some of the other ones that have always stood out to me, glad to hear Penn invoked in the video.) I’d also like to add that A Beautiful Mind is USUALLY invoked nowadays for another reason - for removing any trace of Crowe’s characters’ homosexuality. Again, the film has aged very, very poorly. Part of the reason I wanted to respond to your comment though is your invocation of “the method.” It belies a misunderstanding of the history of that style of acting, and of the era of film performance we’re currently living through. Hollywood and their media’s obsession with Stanislavsky’s technique ebbs and flows every few years, often provoked when someone (usually on a press tour) uses “the method” to justify questionable behaviour during the making of a film, leading to another cycle of stories about how wacky and unpredictable and unstable actors are. It’s widely misunderstood by the public as some eccentric and specific ritual that nearly every actor follows for nearly every role, something that consumes them both on set and in their personal lives, but that’s simply an incorrect interpretation. The crux of “the method” is to train actors to recall real emotional experiences, and to use those authentic feelings from their own lives to fuel and drive their performance. The method was obsessed with intellectualizing everything, and demanded psychological realism above all else. That’s it. It first became popular in the 1950’s thanks to the work of Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and especially Marlon Brando, and was absolutely essential to Hollywood’s evolution toward realism, and away from the stiff, polished, and practiced “traditional” performances / productions of Hollywood’s golden age. It’s current (seeming) ubiquity is explicitly because of its explosive growth in popularity in the second half of the 20th century, and (unsurprisingly) the landscape of modern prestige performance has change A LOT since 1950. I say this because your interpretation that modern actors who play real life figures in Oscar-bait movies are all using “the method” is flat-out wrong, but it keys into something extremely fascinating going on in the world of acting today - another shift on par with the one Clift/Dean/Brando lead in the early 50’s. A move AWAY from the unrestrained authenticity and personalization of the mid-century “method” - and a distinctive turn TOWARD performance as “transformation and immersion.” It’s more like high-end animatronics now, we care a lot about seeing performers disappear into characters - instead of seeing the authentic person shine through the character, as was the priority of The Method during its heyday. And that’s the ultimate point I would make to distinguish from the classic “method” and what we see now. The method was not interested in hiding an actor, it demands they let go and honestly expose the deepest and most vulnerable parts of themselves in service of the character. That is an entirely different order of performance than the fully immersive, detail-oriented, voice/costume/make-up induced technical transformation, that we love to hail now. Our current moment is as antithetical to “the method” as “the method” was to classical golden age star acting. I would argue the codifiers of this trope are probably Meryl Streep and Daniel Day Lewis - although having debuted during the 70’s, it’s clear they were initially trained in that space of psychological intensity and authenticity. I’m thinking specifically of their more transformative roles in films like Sophie’s Choice, A Cry in the Dark, The Iron Lady, Lincoln, and My Left Foot. Or even performances like Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything - films where even a well-known performer can thoroughly disappear into their character work. I’ve been a theatre actor since the mid 2000’s, and have had the privilege to study Stanislavsky’s techniques, and the decades of acting theory and work that came after him. It’s dismaying to see his style evoked so casually (and often) by people who don’t really understand that it is now a piece of history - something that informs the foundational training of almost all new theatre actors, (myself included), but is also deeply connected to, and inherently a product of, it’s birth and boom in the middle of the 20th century. It is not the entirety of acting theory on its own, and it is absolutely not the gold standard for prestige excellence anymore. You’re in the comments of a film youtuber, and she’s literally namedropped in the video, so I’ll assume you’re familiar with The Best film RU-vidr, Be Kind Rewind. One of my favourite things about her channel is that she accidentally created a rather comprehensive history of The Method’s explosion and decline in Hollywood, as she addresses its impact, and evolution, and slow death/metamorphosis, in a number of her videos. If you, or anyone else, is interested I’d highly recommend these ones for a little more insight into what the method actually WAS, and how it differs dramatically from what we are living through today. This episode focuses on Vivien Leigh’s second Oscar win - but it also recounts the production of, and Oscar campaign for, A Streetcar Named Desire, a hugely historically significant film - it made Brando a star, killed the Hays code, and served as an explosive and irrefutable follow-up to Monty Cliff’s opening volley on behalf of the method in Hollywood. It also examines how Leigh, one of the finest classical actors ever, interacted with her costars, all of whom were early Method successes in Hollywood. m.ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-mEWWxAVthyA.html This episode examines Sissy Spacek’s Oscar win, and dissects the Oscars (and the industries’) increasing reliance on biopics/true life stories, and the immersive prestige performance style of today. This is the episode that does the most to unpack how our idea of great acting has changed (and has been changing) in the decades since Brando was young. m.ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QbCW_Kwfhcs.html And this episode examines Anne Bancroft’s Oscar win, specifically contrasting her youthful, modern method approach, with classic film stars like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. The insights provided by this one will be invaluable, Anne was a supremely dedicated student of the method, and is in many ways emblematic of how revelatory this style felt in the early 60’s. m.ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-URwdDUt6pCA.html

It happens the other way around too. 2007 Eddie Murphy won EVERYTHING leading up to the Oscars for best supporting actor. And then they gave it to Alan Arkin who many say was long overdue. That night would have had 3 black actors win acting Oscars for the first time ever. I'm not saying they were trying to prevent that, but that would have been a historic night if Eddie won.

@@PlusUltraAdrian Eddie was pissed too, and rightfully so. I always think of his loss for Dreamgirls and Samuel L Jackson’s for Pulp Fiction - you could tell they were mad.

Izzy at Be Kind Rewind made a video about Halle Berry, definitely check it out!

So true! Thanks for watching!

What is wrong with sean penn that year?

@@ChrolliForeverI’m a proponent of actors being able to play almost any role but rarely have I found actors who have convincingly played mentally challenged people

@@onepurpose315 and you think. Sean penn did an horroble job?

@@ChrolliForever I just didn’t believe it , not top 5 performances of that year for me… Derek luke, Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward norton, Sam Rockwell and others had more worthy performances that year… In my opinion

Washington and Hawke are really co-leads but I can see, agree with the view that the movie was even more about Washington's character than Hawke's.

Yup

The bad press was started by Weinstein

Crowe should have won 3 times in a row

Haha yes!

Love Denzel!

Huh ? Denzel has no chance to beat Casey

@lexkanyima2195 I disagree. Denzel won the SAG award that year, so I think the race was a lot closer than some might believe. And again, this was the first time since 2003 that the SAG best actor winner didn't also win the Oscar.

@@jaylouis8227 but did he win at Bafta ?

@lexkanyima2195 No, but he didn't when he won best actor in 2002 either, so moot point?

This is a huge difference

Washington is usually real good, still good in The Hurricane but I thought that was one of his weaker performances.

​@@suarezguya bit weak

Not sure what Oscar baity means other than being a historical drama which yes the Oscars do tend to really like, more than other kind of films, and/but a lot of them are really good, deserving.

@@suarezguy Oscar bait is supposed to mean when they are historical period dramas that end up critically failing because a lot of audiences believe that when those type of movies do poorly. They were only or mostly made to secure Oscars rather than telling a gripping story, essentially failing at its only task. However A beautiful mind wasn’t a failure of a movie, it was really good and a massive hit but I do prefer that the Oscars gave it to Denzel, who’s lead performance I found to be stronger but ultimately isn’t a movie that the Oscars usually go with

​@Ryan07_20 it was good trigger

Denzel would be snubbed for the rest of his life. And it is long overdue.

It was a weird time

But if Crowe had it timing 3 wins, then Washington had more votes difference

Crowe was snubbed but it was shocking

For Fences ? No, it might be confused

@@lexkanyima2195 Yes

​@@neutral7786why would you think he should have won for Fences ?

@@lexkanyima2195 I didn't see that Denzel washington's performance in Fences was for winning an Oscar. The people wanted Denzel washington to win just because of the Casey affleck accusations.

@@neutral7786 accusations of what ?

Not

Yes, good point!