Radhe – Your Most Wanted Bhai: Seeti Maar – Making | Salman Khan, Disha Patani
Inside Anthony Hopkins’s Unexpected Win at the Oscars
The actor offered to accept via Zoom but the academy said no. Still, he won because of a release strategy that ensured his film would peak at the last minute.
For months, it was considered a sure bet that Chadwick Boseman would win a posthumous best-actor Oscar for his galvanizing performance in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” The Sunday night ceremony was even rearranged around that expected outcome, scheduling Boseman’s category last so his widow, Simone Ledward Boseman, could accept and end the show with a crescendo of emotion.
That didn’t happen. Instead, the surprise winner was Anthony Hopkins for “The Father,” and since the 83-year-old actor was a no-show at the ceremony, the presenter Joaquin Phoenix collected the Oscar in his stead and the telecast abruptly ended.
What went down? I’m told that Hopkins was at home in the Welsh countryside and had offered to accept via Zoom if his name was read, but the Oscars nixed that plan. To distinguish themselves from award shows like the Golden Globes that had been hobbled by videoconferencing mishaps, Oscar producers encouraged nominees to attend the Los Angeles gala in person or to make their way to satellite ceremonies that had been set up in a handful of European cities.
Though his nominated co-star, Olivia Colman, attended the satellite show in London, Hopkins chose to stay put in Wales, and since the producers’ edict was “no Zoom allowed,” the show instead ended anticlimactically. (In lieu of an acceptance speech, Hopkins released an appreciative video on social media the next morning.)
So that’s one burning Oscar question answered, but another still remains: How did Hopkins pull off that shock victory when Boseman’s coronation had felt so certain for so long?
To find out, I called up Michael Barker, who acquired and distributed “The Father” in his role as co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. To hear Barker tell it, Hopkins’s win was more than a year in the making and involved a lot of careful calibration so the film’s lengthy Oscar campaign would peak at the very last minute.
Sony Pictures Classics bought “The Father” in late 2019 and initially planned a rollout similar to that for the company’s Oscar favorite “Call Me by Your Name”: The drama would debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, earn glowing reviews and then relaunch in November with a slow theatrical rollout in the thick of Oscar season.
