Oscars 2022: Jessica Chastain's victory over Penelope Cruz, Olivia Colman shows biopics are awards bait

Oscars 2022 proved yet again The Academy continues to confuse quantity of acting for quality. The most  performance is not always the best.

But for the easily impressed acting body that judges the best acting talent, quantity remains the key marker over economy. Merit shouldn't be measured by how much you convey with all the tools available (from props to make-up and costume), but about how much you convey with the bare minimum.

By design, biopics rarely allow for a performance of such economy. Actors love to ham it up with all sorts of theatricality, exaggerated mannerisms, and manufactured accents. If there is a sure-fire way to win an Oscar for acting, it is by playing a real-life person. For the biopic allows one to quantify a craft which otherwise remains unquantifiable. Just in the last five years, Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), Renée Zellweger (Judy), and now Jessica Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and Will Smith (King Richard) have all done it and taken home their first Oscars.

As many as six actors out of the 10 who jostled for Best Actor and Best Actress honours this year were such portrayals. A good-looking actor not afraid to look unattractive is seen as some bold choice that merits Oscar glory. It's not. Chastain no doubt disappears into her role as the titular Midwestern Evangelical televangelist, embodying her charm, capturing her mannerisms, and giving her a strong voice. But all the gestural intensity can't make up for the character’s lack of interiority. Though packed with incidents and milestones, it is a tedious movie with little insight about the evangelical celebrity. The biopic barely considers its subject's tacit complicity in her husband’s crimes and the church’s corruption, sanding down the rough edges to present her as a more rootable protagonist.

A similar problem haunts King Richard. Will Smith may have won the Oscar for his portrayal of tennis superstar siblings Venus and Serena's father Richard Williams — but the performance is not exactly a winner in straight sets. While the movie doesn't sidestep its subject's faults in its entirety, it simply uses two confrontation scenes with Richard's wife Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis) to virtually check them off before returning to a more reverential treatment.

If The Eyes of Tammy Faye plays like an encyclopedia entry transposed to film, Being the Ricardos plays like Aaron Sorkin’s retrospective editorial on a time and place when the on-screen and off-screen dynamics between Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) were ever so delicate with both dealing with pregnancy, infidelity, and communism accusations. If Kidman’s performance as the comedy icon doesn't register at a level above mimicry, it isn't due to any shortcomings of Kidman as an actor but Aaron Sorkin as a director, who thinks too much like a writer. Amy Schumer's dig at the Oscars ceremony perhaps best captured the movie's issue: "The innovation to make a movie about Lucille Ball without even a moment that’s funny… you make a movie about the most iconic female comedian and not one laugh – brilliant! It’s like making a biopic of Michael Jordan and just showing the bus trips between games.” The script never lets Kidman channel Ball's infectious comedic energy and make a showcase for her own versatility.

Nicole Kidman in Being The Ricardos

The whole truth to the life of any person can never be captured with one version of the story. People are made up of messy contradictions and conflicting identities. Pablo Larrain knows you can't possibly capture the unvarnished truth to the experience of a real-life personality. Not to mention a long-dead one. So, with Spencer, he takes this unknowability in his stride to craft what he calls a "fable from a true tragedy." And this choice is what makes Kristen Stewart's performance in the Princess Diana biopic all the more mesmerising. Because the film doesn't play like a conventional biopic, more like a haunted-house psychological drama. Fittingly, the central performance is less an imitation, more a possession. Stewart gets under the skin of a woman trapped and suffocating in a centuries-old gilded cage. As the film goes on, she digs deeper to find an emotional truth that would have been blurred by the scope of a more conventional biopic. All the anguish bottled up starts to leak out the more she tries to hold on. In running away from the stuffy monarchy lies her emancipation.

Kristen Stewart in Spencer

This is in some contrast to the effortlessly natural performance of Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers. Pedro Almodóvar reunites with his longtime muse for another delightful and moving jaunt. Just as she did in their first collaboration in Live Flesh, she plays a mother, this time stuck in a moral dilemma as the Spanish auteur weaves together a story about motherhood and generational trauma. Almodóvar understands her strengths as an actor and draws out another career-defining role full of strength, courage and remorse.

Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers

As a self-confessed unnatural mother in The Lost Daughter, Olivia Colman telegraphs the emotional complexities in a performance of internalised regret. We get a sense of the turmoil that has festered over her conflict between motherhood and selfhood. Colman won her Oscar playing a real person too: Queen Anne in The Favourite. Like Spencer, Yorgos Lanthimos's film takes plenty of creative liberties in its deliriously comedic treatment of British history. In an utterly unhinged turn, Colman cuts a pitiable figure as a queen who is lonely and insecure despite being the Queen of England.

Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter

An actor's immediate set of accessible trade tools are their face and physicality, and how they employ them in emotional expression. Make-up, costumes and props are secondary. In the desire for transformance for some delusional idea to capture realism, the biopic lays added emphasis on these extrinsic tools. Indeed, there's never any doubt over why actors take assistance of said tools and remain attracted to transformational roles every year. It is awards catnip, a straight shortcut to the Oscar podium.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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