The award season has always been a time of confusion more than celebration. And Jamie Foxx has had an experience – in life and career – that taught him well to expect both. The multi-talented singer, comedian, and actor who has delivered more wins than losses stayed on the public radar for a long time for his successively brilliant presence and performance in Hollywood. And there was only so much time before the Academy had to stop and recognize the enduring performance of the man so he could take home an Oscar.
However, the Academy Award for Best Actor hardly ever comes without its fair share of drama and Jamie Foxx was no different to the same treatment that was meted out to everyone else at every ceremonial program that the celebrities were required to attend.
Jamie Foxx Dissed For Oscar Win Over Leonardo DiCaprio
The year was 2005 and it would mark three events during the awards season: the first Best Actor Oscar nomination for Leonardo DiCaprio, the first Academy Award win for Jamie Foxx, and the end of the five-year relationship between DiCaprio and the Brazilian supermodel, Gisele Bündchen. Despite being separate events, all three were linked by a single thread and Bündchen made sure to tug hard on it and make her opinion known to anyone that would hear her:
“[Leonardo DiCaprio] is not just my boyfriend but he’s an amazing actor. He’s really talented and I was so proud of him. I figured I should go and support my man so I went [to the Oscars] just for that reason. I don’t think he was expecting to win. I think I was more upset because I thought he deserved it more than [Foxx]. I was like, ‘He did a better job than him!’”
As usual, the Academy’s call was a controversial one and despite DiCaprio’s seminal performance in the Martin Scorsese drama of a tortured man weighed down by his neuroses and the need to feel a connection in The Aviator, it was ultimately the journey of the esteemed jazz musician, Ray Charles, over a span of 30 years that won Jamie Foxx the Academy’s approval.
The Close Oscar Hits and Misses of Leonardo DiCaprio
Despite the multitude of spell-bounding projects that have established Leonardo DiCaprio in Hollywood over the decades since his arrival on the scene in the early 90s, the Academy has loved him just as much as it evaded him. Not once throughout his magnificent career has he won the Oscar for Best Actor/Supporting Actor until the extremely graphic and violent Alejandro González Iñárritu film The Revenant premiered in 2015.
The five previous nominations that were awarded to him for his roles in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), The Aviator (2004), Blood Diamond (2006), and the 2 nods for The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) in Best Actor and Best Picture categories established him as one of the rare few actors that displayed such stunning achievements in cinema and were yet to take home an Oscar. After his win at the 88th Academy Awards, he received yet another Best Actor nod for the Quentin Tarantino fiesta, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). The film was nominated for a total of 10 Oscars and DiCaprio’s co-star, Brad Pitt, took home the golden statuette for Best Supporting Actor.
Source: Contact Music
