Best Actor: Kaluuya, Hopkins, Oldman, Hanks, and Lindo?

Steven Yeun‘s performance in Lee Isaac Chung‘s “Minari”  Is solid, but squeezing him as one of the five Best Actor nominees? Nah. It’s a stretch, but a 10.23 Clayton Davis Variety piece about how Yeun “could become the first Asian American Best Actor nominee” is setting down a narrative for the upcoming awards season. However, there’s fundamentally nothing stunning about Yeun’s performance in the film. in which he plays a struggling South Korean man-of-the-house who moves his entire family to the American heartland.

Hollywood-Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells spoke to me earlier today about the film and the performance, my response, and then wrote something about it: “Minari is too subdued for Academy tastes. It’s more of a memory thing than any kind of story. Clayton Davis lives in his own world. He likes to create his own Oscar-race narratives, purely based on his own tastes. That’s not how it works. Minari was not screened at TIFF or NYFF, nor was it part of Telluride’s lineup. It’s been mostly forgotten.”

Meanwhile, our very own Theo Fisher (@theofisher11) has these as the 5 main acting contenders:

Daniel Kaluuya 

Kaluuya’s careful choosing of projects and outrageously good performances in the likes of “Get Out” and “Widows” has meant his path to an Oscar looks inevitable. The fantastic first trailer for “Judas” leans heavily on the clearly emphatic performance of Kaluuya. Safe to say this career-best could lead him to the trophy. 

Anthony Hopkins 

From the new generation to one of cinema’s most legendary sons. Nominated for “The Two Popes” last year could the three-time nominee strike gold for his role as a man struggling with the wages of aging in “The Father”.

Gary Oldman 

Having waited so long for his first Oscar, Oldman could hit the top twice in three years on the back of Fincher’s “Mank”.

Tom Hanks 

Hanks managed only his second nomination in nearly two decades last season for his turn as Mr. Rogers, and there’s every chance he can go back to back for the first time since 1994-95 when he took home to two best actor titles.

Delroy Lindo 

One that many (including myself) hope doesn’t get forgotten. Lindo embodied passion, pain, and electrifying energy in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”, a performance that at the time shot him to the top of many ballots. But as with most years, those early year releases can struggle to stay in the minds of voters, especially considering the 2021 Oscars will be over a year since the film debuted on Netflix.

At this point Yeun should be considered a “dark horse,” the narrative forming about his being nominated as the first Asian-American in the Best Actor is going to be a forcefully resonant one for many I’m sure. But he belongs in the second group of contenders which also includes Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal), Trevante Rhodes (The United States vs Billie Holiday), and Kingsley Ben-Adir (One Night in Miami).

Back to “Minari,” I saw it in January of this year at Sundance, here’s what I wrote about it:

“Based on the director’s own upbringing in the 1980s as a seven-year-old Korean American boy, the film has on-screen father Jacob (Steven Cheung) disapprovingly moving his son, David, and daughter from the West Coast to rural Arkansas with frustrated wife, Monica — she’s irked by the relocation to a mobile home in the middle of nowhere. Troublemaker David and his sister are bored by the vast plains, but have their lives quickly disrupted when their grandmother arrives from Korea to live with them and set the family dynamic straight again, but life gets in the way, and things don’t go as planned. Meanwhile, Jacob passionately wants to use their 50 acres of crop to open his own farming business of Korean vegetables, throwing the family’s finances in danger, his marriage out of loop, and the stability of the family into freefall. Chung tackles the American Dream with the highs and lows of this Korean emigree family. There are shades of Ozu’s bittersweet nature here, ditto the perceptive details that made the Japanese master’s films so indelibly memorable. Each character is fully sketched by Chung, who throws episodic melodrama at his audience to tell his story. A film like “Minari” getting overpraised could be dangerous to its overall impact. Make sure to go into this film fully aware of its simple but substance-filled frames. The lack of any showiness is, in fact, part of Minari’s charm. Whether it can build up an audience upon its release this summer is still up in the air due to the aforementioned subtleties, but this is a film whose every scene was carefully chosen by its director.”

“Minari” is expected to be released sometime before Oscar eligibility ends in February 2021.