A brief his­to­ry of the ​“lega­cy Oscar” and its winners

The big head­line from last night’s Acad­e­my Awards would have to trum­pet the sweep­ing suc­cess of Every­thing Every­where All at Once, which rode a groundswell of sup­port to a whop­ping sev­en stat­uettes for the unlike­ly indie pro­duc­tion. So great was the tide of favour that it lift­ed all relat­ed boats, includ­ing that of Jamie Lee Cur­tis, who picked up Best Sup­port­ing Actress for her role as demon­i­cal­ly pos­sessed tax audi­tor Deirdre Beaubeirdre.

Even before her speech enu­mer­at­ing the var­i­ous peo­ple who have vic­ar­i­ous­ly ​“won an Oscar” through her vic­to­ry, Cur­tis seemed an odd pick for the cat­e­go­ry, hon­oured for a less-than-meaty ter­tiary role that com­mand­ed lit­tle of the praise heaped upon the film. But her win makes slight­ly more sense as a career-long salute to a beloved actress who doesn’t often appear in the type of film up for awards-sea­son glo­ry, her work more root­ed in the genre movies like Hal­loween that first made her a star.

There’s a long and sto­ried his­to­ry of Acad­e­my Awards going to the wrong per­for­mance by the right per­former, due in part to vot­ers tak­ing a broad­er view of their recog­ni­tion as a cumu­la­tive dis­tinc­tion. Whether mak­ing right a past injus­tice or using one year’s nom­i­na­tion as an infor­mal career-long acknowl­edge­ment, the Acad­e­my doesn’t get bogged down in the par­tic­u­lars as they rechris­ten an actor wor­thy on the whole into an Oscar winner.

The so-called ​“make­up Oscar,” an award bestowed as an unspo­ken mea cul­pa for a past tour de force that didn’t make its way to the podi­um, dates back near­ly to the incep­tion of the Acad­e­my Awards them­selves. Bette Davis caused a stir in 1934, when her wide­ly adored yet offi­cial­ly ignored turn in Of Human Bondage com­pelled the Acad­e­my to allow write-in votes just to avoid a riot; she got the nom­i­na­tion but not the award, pick­ing up the Best Actress prize next year for Dangerous.

Davis resent­ed that what she con­sid­ered a less­er film would be next to her name in the record books, dou­bly so in a year that saw Katharine Hep­burn give a supe­ri­or show­ing in the romance Alice Adams. Davis said: ​“This nagged at me. It was true that even if the hon­our had been earned, it had been earned last year. There was no doubt that Hepburn’s per­for­mance deserved the award. These mis­takes com­pound each oth­er like the orig­i­nal lie that breeds like a bun­ny. Now she should get it next year when some­one else may deserve it.”

The ​“make­up Oscar” (not to be con­fused with the Oscar they give for make­up) soon became a bash­ful tra­di­tion, repeat­ed a few years lat­er when Jim­my Stew­art was passed over for people’s pick Mr. Smith Goes to Wash­ing­ton, then award­ed for The Philadel­phia Sto­ry. There’s an argu­ment to be made that Leonar­do DiCaprio did the same not so long ago, his cita­tion for The Revenant in 2016 a cor­rec­tion to his snub two years pri­or, when his era-defin­ing take on Jor­dan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street lost out to Matthew McConaugh­ey​‘s more by-the-book, Oscar-friend­ly work in the AIDS dra­ma Dal­las Buy­ers Club.

The case of DiCaprio in par­tic­u­lar speaks to the sep­a­rate yet relat­ed phe­nom­e­non of the lega­cy Oscar, in which an award implic­it­ly dou­bles as a life­time achieve­ment prize for a rich­er body of work with­out the gold to match. Cur­tis falls into this cat­e­go­ry, as would her main com­pe­ti­tion Angela Bas­sett, her poten­tial win for Black Pan­ther: Wakan­da For­ev­er a tac­it salute to decades of indeli­ble act­ing in films far­ther from the Acad­e­my radar.

Scan­ning the recent slates of win­ners, the lega­cy Oscar appears more and more fre­quent­ly; even the most ded­i­cat­ed Jes­si­ca Chas­tain fans (also known as ​“Chas­taini­acs”) would have a hard time call­ing The Eyes of Tam­my Faye her finest hour, but she’d accrued a rep­u­ta­tion as an alto­geth­er deserv­ing thes­pi­an by that point in her career, and that was enough. Same goes for Gary Old­man in Dark­est Hour, Joaquin Phoenix for Jok­er, and Julianne Moore for Still Alice.

And so one starts to see where con­ven­tion­al Acad­e­my wis­dom like ​“it’s their time,’ or, ​“an actor always wins for their worst per­for­mance,” comes from. In a pal­try cat­e­go­ry with­out an odds-on favourite, vot­ers default to the option with the clear­est air of pres­tige, a respectable choice in gen­er­al rather than in spe­cif­ic. In oth­er words: just keep punch­ing that clock, Amy Adams. Your time will come, right when you least expect it.