Eddie Murphy Should Have Won Oscars For These Movies, According To Ryan Reynolds

In 1949, Alec Guinness dazzled critics and paying audiences alike by playing eight members, male and female, of the D'Ascoyne family in the deliciously dark comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets." There weren't many actors alive cocky enough to attempt such a thing, let alone pull it off (Peter Sellers was still in the early stages of honing his craft, which he'd unleash in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"), so you'd think the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would go gaga for the actor's brazen feat and hand him the Best Actor Oscar before the ceremony began. Amazingly, he didn't even receive a nomination (though John Wayne snared his first for basically playing John Wayne in "Sands of Iwo Jima").

How did Guinness not even earn the honor of an Oscar nod? He made one critical mistake: he gave his bravura performance in a comedy.

Of the 96 films that have won the Academy Award for Best Picture, only 15 could be called comedies (and I'm being super charitable with movies like "Green Book" and "American Beauty"). This is due to a generally unstated view of comedy as a somehow lesser form of dramatic art. Comedies, you see, are frivolous, ephemeral, and unlikely to bore audiences to tears with a barrage of virtue like Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi." Get too free in acknowledging their Oscar-worthiness, and the next thing you know Pauley Shore will be taking home the Irving G. Thalberg Award. Or something.

In any event, this is why masters like Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams never won competitive Oscars for comedies. Or why the Shakespearian great Guinness was snubbed for "slumming." You can say there must be something else to this (that, for instance, studios and publicists prioritize dramas during the now year-long awards cycle), but a near-century of ignoring classic comedies and the phenomenal performances within them is a big enough sample size by which to conclude that comedies are undesirable to Oscar voters. And in my opinion, no one has been done a greater disservice via this bias than Eddie Murphy. 

Think I'm overstating things? We'll maybe you'll listen to Ryan Reynolds.

Ryan Reynolds recently dropped by the Variety Awards Circuit podcast to discuss the likely-to-be-ignored "Deadpool & Wolverine," and, in making a case for funny films, held up two of Eddie Murphy's finest performances as proof-positive that the Oscars do comedy dirty. "We sort of unnecessarily hurdle ourselves over comedy as a craft," said Reynolds, "And if you ask me, one of the greatest injustices is that Eddie Murphy doesn't have an Oscar for 'The Nutty Professor' or ['Nutty Professor II: The Klumps']."

As I've written before on /Film, Murphy failing to get so much as a nomination for "The Nutty Professor" was a crime that rendered the 1996 Best Actor competition completely null and void — because he should've won that Oscar, and the vote shouldn't have been particularly close. As Reynolds said on the Variety podcast, "Just the fact that he could sit at a table and be 10 different characters at one table, that is singular," Reynolds said. "And that is a kind of talent that, I don't know that we've at this stage in our scientific journey of life could understand fully."

It was actually five characters (Sherman, Cletus, Anna Pearl, Ida Mae, and Ernie), but the richness of character detail Murphy brings out in what could've easily been broad caricatures is extraordinary. Each person is totally unlike the other, yet so clearly related in the distinct and indistinct ways we resemble our own family members. What Murphy does in the first film and its sequel (via an essential assist from retired make-up effects guru Rick Baker) is otherworldly.

Murphy has only been nominated for an Oscar once (for his musical/dramatic portrayal of James "Thunder" Early in "Dreamgirls"), and may be due another whenever the George Clinton biopic he's making with his "Dreamgirls" director Bill Condon is released. But no matter how brilliant he is in the film, it will unavoidably be, in part, a lifetime achievement award encompassing all of the superb comedies he made at the height of his young career.