Oscar Seasoning: Why Is the Best Actor Race Always Less Exciting Than the Best Actress One?

Happy New Year! I hope 2026 is kind to you and all of your awards season dreams come true.

Now and then, someone on social media shares the list of the Best Actor winners of the past decade or so, and everyone comments on how poor the selections are. Why have these choices aged so poorly compared to their female counterparts? Did we really give the biggest honour in cinema to that guy for that performance? What were we thinking? It all made sense at the time, but there is a wider truth at play here: the Best Actor race is, by and large, way less interesting than the Best Actress one.

Is it controversial to say that actors have it easier than actresses? Hardly. Look at how Best Actor winners get to historically be older than Best Actresses, with the latter always fearing ageing out of prime roles by the time they hit 35. Or how it’s basically unheard of for a man to be Oscar-nominated for playing the bland but supportive spouse to a female protagonist, while the opposite remains the main way actresses get recognition. Men (or at least cishet white American dudes) get a greater variety of roles, and yet the awards-y ones are stifling in their limitations.

We talk about this a lot: what is an awards baity performance? The tropes are pretty gender neutral, for the most part: big emotions, playing real people, narratives of trauma or overcoming major life challenges, major physical transformations, and usually in the drama genre. Certain subgenres do well – Hollywood or industry stories, musical biopics, boxing flicks – but don’t expect too much in the way of sci-fi, horror, or comedy. Is there a great man or genius in the midst of a crisis where he may be required to wear prosthetics? For Your Consideration!

It’s often been said that Oscar bait is the blandest distillation of cinema. The Academy, for all the grumbling that it doesn’t give enough awards to blockbusters, is a decidedly middlebrow and mainstream organisation. Even the quirkiest actors who earn kudos from voters don’t do so for their most daring work. You don’t nominate Nicole Kidman for Babygirl or Birth; you nominate her for Being the Ricardos. The industry still sees men as its figureheads, and usually cishet white men of a certain age who can embody that idol image of decades gone by. They also like to make an actor wait until they’re older (read: 40+) and “more distinguished” before they win. That notion can limit the kind of roles they celebrate even further.

(I just pretend he won Best Actor for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)

It’s not that there aren’t amazing actors out there giving exceptional lead performances worthy of recognition (won’t somebody think of the poor men?) But the stuff they’re rewarded for tends to appeal to a definition of acting that can quickly wear thin. Look, I will never be mad that Brendan Fraser has an Oscar, but The Whale is the very definition of this problem: a trite actorly showcase where subtlety is sidelined for showy labour, heavy prosthetics, and a notion of suffering, both on and off the screen. Joaquin Phoenix should have won an Oscar years before Joker, but there was a movie that let him be big and tortured and skinny and “dangerous” (and also that movie made so much money – also, he’s better in the sequel but we’re not ready for that conversation.) The Academy ignores decades of Gary Oldman being prickly, stylistically off the wall, and genuinely challenging as a performer, just so they can award him for putting on a fatsuit to play a “great man.” These are all actors who do amazing work but the Oscars wants it boiled down to a simple question: how hard was it to do this?

Women aren’t exempt from this gamifying of the craft. Acting is a tough thing to quantify, and for a lot of people, they see “good acting” as being the most evident display of all the homework someone did. This is why biopics are such awards bait. How many hours of videos did you watch to be able to replicate that famous singer? How much weight did you lose or gain? How long did you work with a voice coach? How psychologically taxing was the entire experience? Actresses do this a lot, but as with the bastardising of method acting, it’s seen as far worthier and more laborious when men do it. The bar is, frankly, lower for dudes.

I have a theory, admittedly one that’s shared with many in this field, that a lot of dudes see acting as unmasculine and try to overcompensate with faux-method nonsense and d*ck-strutting. They don’t think putting on wigs and playing is “real” work so they have to make it seem tougher and more torturous than it is. You see this attitude reflected a lot in Best Actor winners and nominees: bruising boxers, murderous gangsters, geniuses with agonising quandaries on their shoulders, men at war, and elevated comic book villains. Macho dudes who cry after they do horrible things, to be super petty in my description.

So, in this context, the 2025 season is kind of unique for the Best Actor race. Our frontrunners are largely biopic-free, and the main contenders in that subgenre are decidedly un-biopic-y movies (Blue Moon and Marty Supreme.) Leonardo DiCaprio is doing goofball work as a faded revolutionary and stoned loser. Joel Edgerton is quiet and contemplative in Train Dreams. Wagner Moura is sly, enigmatic, and quietly furious in the deeply layered The Secret Agent. Michael B. Jordan is pulling double duties in a historical vampire musical thriller. These men have all grabbed attention away from those more typical Best Actor choices, like Jeremy Allen White’s Springsteen impression or Dwayne Johnson going serious. This doesn’t happen all the time. Dare I say it but I have some skin in the game for this category.

(It would be fun if the Best Actor winner was the one who provided the most memes.)

I’m rooting for Wagner Moura, who gave my favourite performance of the year in my favourite film of 2025. It’s an uphill climb, alas. He’s giving a performance in Portuguese in a category where non-English language nominees seldom win, and he’s up against both a bona fide movie star and the millennial icon of the moment. But is it more thrilling than the Best Actress race? The options feel more varied, both in terms of movie and performance, with the women: Jessie Buckley, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, Renate Reinsve, Cynthia Erivo, Amanda Seyfried, Emma Stone, Kate Hudson, Chase Infiniti, etc.

But this is also increasingly typical of the Best Actress debate. It feels like the women are getting attention for weirder and nervier roles in ways they never used to. It would have previously been unthinkable to give that award to a role like that of Emma Stone’s character in Poor Things or Michelle Yeoh’s in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Demi Moore was a Best Actress nominee for a body horror satire where she turned into a mutant! The men just aren’t getting to be that weird most of the time. Let dudes be freaky little guys.

On a basic industry level, I think a lot of us are more excited for actress races because we know the stakes are higher for these women. Gender equity is a fantasy in Hollywood, and opportunities are thinner on the ground for women in front of and behind the camera. A lot of our greatest performers just aren’t getting the work they deserve. An Oscar nomination can change that. People are retroactively getting mad at Michelle Yeoh for sharing that screenshot, noting how a Best Actress win would be more beneficial for her than Cate Blanchett, but she was 100% right. Timothee Chalamet could be blanked by the Oscars for the rest of his career, and he’ll be fine in terms of work.

The race is young, and a lot of narratives have yet to fully form. For now, with the men, I think the race feels like it’s going to be Leo vs. Timmy, and their roles are far more interesting than previous noms for each (sorry, A Complete Unknown fans.) But in my heart, I remain an actress-sexual for a reason.

(She should have won.)

I’ll be delving more into awards season and my predictions over the coming weeks. Let me know what races/performers/movies you’re interested in, and we can do a deep dive!