Could Kieran Culkin Win an Oscar for Playing Himself?

Though last weekend’s Critics Choice Awards included a few unexpected wins, one category saw zero suspense. The Best Supporting Actor prize went to A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin, just as it did at the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, among others. The only difference is that Culkin was not personally in attendance at Critics Choice, depriving the audience of what’s become one of this season’s signature rituals. When you give Culkin an award, he accepts it in the same manner by which he earned it, turning in a series of freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness monologues. In a sea of polished professionals, Culkin’s charmingly disheveled podium moments stand out as exciting and authentic — potent demonstrations in the art of anti-campaigning.

However, precisely because Culkin’s character in A Real Pain is also a charmingly disheveled guy given to freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness monologues, his speeches have inspired a nagging thought in many awards-season observers. Namely: Isn’t Culkin winning all these awards basically for playing himself?

“This question cuts to the very heart of the acting matter: character or self-portrait?” acting teacher Anthony Abeson told me. “It’s a paradox that continues to fascinate me.”

At the root of the issue is a philosophical difference between what we might call European acting versus American acting — broadly speaking, the gap between acting as aiming toward an objective ideal and acting as self-expression. “We are the only western country where actors have been encouraged, both subtly and not so subtly, to ‘just be yourself,’” Abeson said. The best performances synthesize these outlooks, he said. “There is no Romeo without the actor playing him. But at the same time, there can’t be just a self-portrait of the actor. I cannot not start with me, because who the hell else is going to play Romeo? But I have an honor and an obligation to not end with me.”

In A Real Pain, Culkin plays Benji, a live-wire ne’er-do-well attempting to reconnect with his staid cousin, David (Jesse Eisenberg), on a Holocaust tour of Poland. He’s a damaged guy who still lives at home, but he also possesses what Richard Brody calls “a weird, narcissistic empathy: his reaction to others is so strong that they disappear within his raging turmoil.” It’s a display of immense personal magnetism. “Culkin is an actor of emotional sensitivity who doesn’t grovel for the audience’s love, and he’s shockingly great here,” Manohla Dargis raved, calling his performance “transparently readable, sometimes viscerally destabilizing.”

The role — a broken man hiding his pain through incessant chatter — is not a million miles away from Culkin’s Emmy-winning turn as Roman Roy in Succession. But Benji “is a very different guy,” noted Terry Knickerbocker, an acting coach for stars like Daniel Craig and Sam Rockwell. “Are there some similarities? Well, yeah: Kieran Culkin’s good at being cocky and irreverent, and both of those characters have that. But I would say the fundamental heartbreak in A Real Pain is not something he’s doing” in Succession, or in his public appearances, where Culkin appears to be a normal, well-adjusted person who carries none of the weight that Benji does.

What appears to be tripping people up is that Culkin’s voice and mannerisms remain unchanged from role to role. His performances in Succession and A Real Pain are marked by a free-associative style that, as he explained to my colleague Rachel Handler last year, he prefers not to call improv. (He calls it blagging, British slang that means something similar to fast talk.) “It’s written, and I understand the character, and then some shit comes out sometimes; that’s it,” Culkin said. Key to this is a sense of offhandedness: “I don’t force it.”

But it’s also possible that Oscars history has skewed people’s barometers a bit. If there’s one thing we know about the Academy, it’s that its voters love a transformation. Many actors’ awards campaigns hammer home the effort involved in playing someone totally unlike themselves — how they physically became a different person through the power of makeup, how they learned to sing just like the musician they were playing. Thus, when presented with a performance and campaign that make no pretenses to such effort, we forget that transformations are not the only kind of performance. “It’s not better acting because it’s splashy or huge,” Knickerbocker said.

He compared Culkin’s performance to Robert Duvall’s in 1983’s Tender Mercies. Both are “subtle performances where the acting is invisible. When you have a more delicate character that’s not as dynamic or wild, that takes an immense amount of skill. I don’t think Kieran should be faulted because this performance is more close to home. The only question is does it honor the script?”

I would argue that it does. The reason Culkin is running as a supporting actor is that the film is told from the perspective of David, who has a tangled knot of emotions toward his cousin: He loves Benji and is charmed by him, but he’s also jealous and resentful of him. Through Culkin’s performance, the audience feels that same complicated mix. “He’s just a charismatic, super-tragic, super-alive, super-searching, deep fellow,” Knickerbocker said. “I really can’t imagine anyone else playing the part as well.”

Abeson, though, was willing to grant that Culkin’s critics might have a point: “He’s being criticized for not fully availing himself of his magical ability, as Stanislavski said, to have a complete and utter transformation into another human being — a kind of reincarnation.” In a way, they were giving him a gift, he said. “They’re saying, ‘Your self-portrait’s good, but we expect a little more from you.’ It’s kind of nice how sometimes the public can stimulate the development of the artist.”

Why Did Pundits Underestimate Anora?

For members of Team Anora, last Saturday could have been the greatest day of their lives. Like a Russian princess reclaiming her birthright, the Palme d’Or–winning strip-club comedy took back its front-runner title with a pair of victories at the DGA and PGA Awards last weekend. Throw in that Best Picture win at Friday night’s Critics Choice Awards — not exactly a major precursor but still nice to have — and it took only 24 hours for Anora’s Oscars fortune to rise from rhinestones to diamonds.

I’d caution against thinking the Best Picture race is done and dusted. (Remember: La La Land and 1917 won the same pair of trophies.) Nevertheless, for the first time, this unsettled Oscar season is finally starting to come into focus, and as it has, pundits are reawakening to Anora’s many appealing qualities. It’s a warm, funny movie with plenty of heart. It has an underdog feistiness that the new Academy tends to favor. And, crucially, almost everyone likes it — a factor that plays particularly well on the preferential ballot that the PGA and Academy both employ. But these are all factors that have been there all along. So why did so many Oscar-watchers discount them in the season’s closing stretch? Stay close to me as I shine a light on why pundits hesitated to put a ring on Anora.

It Blanked at the Golden Globes.

The Golden Globes are voted on by a few hundred random journalists who have no overlap with the film industry at large. And yet, as the first major televised awards show, the Globes wield a tremendous influence on the race … and they snubbed Anora entirely. Soon after, the Los Angeles wildfires put the season on pause, meaning the Globes results lingered in memories longer than they otherwise might have. We’ve seen with films like 2018’s A Star Is Born how a cold shoulder from the Globes can be just the thing that turns an ostensible front-runner into an also-ran. It didn’t help, either, that one of the contenders who got the biggest boost from the Globes was The Substance’s Demi Moore, whose lead-actress win kneecapped Anora in one of the categories it was thought to be strongest.

It’s Not Crafts-y.

Come Oscar-nominations day, Anora got in everywhere it might have expected: Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, and Editing. But if you’ve graduated from kindergarten, you know that adds up to only six, far short of the double-digit hauls managed by competitors like The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez. In the era of the preferential ballot, nomination totals don’t matter the way they used to, but considering The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez also beat Anora at the Globes, it was easy to feel as though they were the contenders with all the momentum.

It’s Less Explicitly Political.

In the galvanizing opening of the second Trump administration, voters who wanted to send a message seemed to be gravitating toward Emilia Pérez, whose trans-empowerment themes marked a rebuke of the new president’s policies. (Never mind what many actual trans people thought.) We all saw how that turned out, but before Emilia Pérez imploded, it made sense to consider it the front-runner, especially remembering how Moonlight rode Hollywood’s anti-Trump sentiment to a Best Picture win eight years ago. Anora, a film about the outsize influence wielded by foreign oligarchs, certainly has its own political resonance this year. However, its campaign emphasized that element less than the film’s twisted love story.

It’s Raunchy.

Even Academy members who loved Anora told me they had a hard time seeing it as a Best Picture winner. It’s filled with sex, nudity, and twerking, with a gimlet-eyed view toward sex work that offers neither Forrest Gump–style condescension nor Pretty Woman romance. We’re just a year removed from Poor Things winning multiple trophies, but that film’s ribaldry was attached to an Oscars-friendly story of a woman’s self-actualization. While Anora has definite emotional appeal, it’s not uplifting in the same way.

It Was the Early Front-runner.

Oscar pundits occasionally remind me of a line from Mad Men: We’ll ding a movie whose only sin is being familiar. Anora had led the pack since May, but it wasn’t an Oppenheimer-level colossus. As other contenders arrived on the scene, pundits got restless and their eyes started to wander. Didn’t Wicked look nice today? Wasn’t Emilia Pérez flirting with them in the elevator? In a sense, blanking at the Golden Globes was one of the best things to happen to Anora: Oscar-watchers got a little break from it. Now that Sean Baker’s film has reemerged as the front-runner, pundits resemble a long-married partner realizing they’ve taken their spouse for granted. Suddenly, they’re seeing her in a whole new light.