John Malkovich says the Oscar race he remembers is gone. At 72, he said awards campaigning now stretches on for months and has become, in his view, the main way to get people into theaters.
That is why his latest comments landed now. He is being heavily tipped for an Oscar nomination for his performance in Martin McDonagh’s CIA black comedy Wild Horse Nine, a film that has brought him back into awards talk three decades after his last serious run at the Oscars.
Malkovich, who was previously nominated for best supporting actor for Places in the Heart in 1984 and In the Line of Fire in 1993, said the business around awards has changed because the movie business itself has changed. He said Hollywood is no longer operating in the same world he knew when he last felt the buzz of a campaign, and he tied that shift directly to streaming, which has taken over theaters in ways that did not exist then.
He also described how little he had thought about the ceremony itself. Malkovich said he was told, “You’re nominated for an Academy Award,” and recalled feeling overwhelmed when he went to the Oscars only once, for Places in the Heart. He remembered heading to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with Phyllis Carlyle, only to be told, “Honey! It’s the Oscars, there’s no side door!”
That memory sits beside a blunt assessment of the present. Malkovich said campaigns for films are often now the only way to make the public go see them in theaters, even though he said he is not a huge fan of awards ceremonies. In his view, older Oscar seasons were built around films that had already been seen, already earned money and already proved themselves before the trophies came into play. He pointed to The Killing Fields, Places in the Heart and In the Line of Fire as examples of that older rhythm.
Wild Horse Nine is the film testing that newer model. It first premiered at Venice Film Festival in September, where it received rave reviews and brought Malkovich the best actor prize. The film then had its U.K. premiere at London Film Festival on Friday, keeping its awards momentum alive as the Oscar talk around him grew louder.
There is still a gap between attention and nomination, and that is the part Malkovich cannot control. Wild Horse Nine has given him his first real shot at an Academy Award in three decades, but the final verdict has not arrived. What his remarks make plain is that, for actors now, the campaign is no longer a sideshow to the work. It is part of how the work reaches an audience at all.
