He should have won it for “Magnolia,” but Tom Cruise, the man considered one of the last great movie stars, is now being backed by what will be a massive Warner Bros.-led campaign to get him his first golden statuette.
This week, a three-minute teaser for “Digger” was released, yet close to 2.5 of those minutes contained no actual footage from the anticipated film. Instead, it was essentially a Tom Cruise greatest-hits montage that appeared to be laying the groundwork for an awards campaign.
Cruise finally has his best shot at winning, and the campaign is already in full bloom as plenty of his acting and directing friends — see below — are starting to come out of the woodwork, piling on the praise, amplifying the buzz, and shaping a narrative that will become inescapable by the fall: it’s time for Tom Cruise to win that Oscar.
In “Digger,” Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a Texan oil tycoon who is warned about a massive glacier named Judy that is set to wreak global chaos. When he initially refuses to heed the warnings, the consequences become dire. He is then suddenly convinced that fate has called him to save the world.
Oscar voters love transformative performances and de-glamming, and Cruise’s transformation in “Digger” — aging makeup, a prosthetic nose, a potbelly, combed-over hair, and a very thick Southern accent — will be a major talking point.
Despite four Oscar nominations — three for his performances in “Born on the Fourth of July,” “Jerry Maguire,” and “Magnolia” — Cruise has yet to secure a competitive win. Yet he continues to work at a feverish pace, and “Digger” might be the best shot he has had at winning in more than 25 years.
If it weren’t for Daniel Day-Lewis’s landmark turn in “My Left Foot,” Cruise probably would have won the Oscar in 1990 for Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July.” It was a fearless, career-defining performance as Ron Kovic, a disillusioned Vietnam veteran whose physical and emotional unraveling was impossible to unsee.
He should have won, full stop, for “Magnolia.” As Frank T.J. Mackey, Cruise discarded every preconceived notion of his screen persona. It was raw. It was explosive. It represented the highest order of his art. A foul-mouthed alpha-guru with a soul crumbling beneath the surface, that performance was like watching a ticking time bomb.
He also should have been nominated for “Collateral,” where he turned the hitman into something elegant and chilling. And don’t even get me started on “Tropic Thunder” — the comedic brilliance of Les Grossman was so unexpected that it practically made us forget it was Cruise underneath all that makeup.
Technically speaking, Cruise already has an Oscar — the honorary kind, presented to him last year at a ceremony. His “Digger” director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, presented him with the trophy.
“This may be his first Oscar,” Alejandro González Iñárritu said in his introduction of Cruise, “but from what I have seen and experienced, this will not be the last.”
He may be right.
