Jared Leto — Oscar winner for Dallas Buyers Club (2013) — looks like he's cruising toward becoming the fourth actor to receive Razzie and Oscar nominations for the same performance.
Leto's wildly hammy performance in the polarizing House of Gucci was not most people's idea of a Best Supporting Actor performance — more like Most Supporting Actor.
Nonetheless, the film was a modest hit in a pandemic (especially for an adult drama), Leto has won the Oscar before and Oscar voters seem borderline obsessed with actors who play real people.
Today, February 7, the list of Razzie nominations came out, just a day before we hear who's been Oscar-nominated. Leto, as was widely expected, was nominated, along with Ben Affleck (The Last Duel), Nick Cannon (The Misfits), Mel Gibson (Dangerous) and Gareth Keegan (Diana the Musical).
He's a shoo-in to win.
If Leto's name is called Tuesday morning when the Oscar noms are announced, he will be just the fourth actor to receive both a Razzie nomination and an Oscar nomination for the same performance. Curiously, they were all for supporting performances.
The others were:
(1) James Coco for Only When I Laugh (1981): Coco's turn as a failed gay actor was broad, and received mixed reviews, like the film, which was loathed by Siskel & Ebert, loved by Vincent Canby ... and was a hit at the B.O. Reminds me of House of Gucci and Leto to a "T." Coco died of a heart attack just six years after his nomination.
(2) Amy Irving for Yentl (1983): Irving was nominated for a Razzie as the love interest of Mandy Patinkin's character, but who marries Yentl (Barbra Streisand). Irving, whose character is demure in the film, was probably being punished simply for being in Yentl, which was seen by some as an embarrassing vanity production (Streisand was pointedly nominated for Worst Actor), but which had genuine support from many others. This also sounds like House of Gucci.
(3) Glenn Close for Hillbilly Elegy (2020): She was robbed of an Oscar more than once (okay, eight times — it was eight times), so some thought Close might get a consolation Oscar as the tough-talking Appalachian grandmother in this film adaptation of the memoir by right-winger J.D. Vance. Instead, she was left at Oscar's altar again — and snagged a Razzie nomination in the process. The Leto parallel here would be an Oscar-worthy actor in full "transformation" mode.
The Oscar nominations are announced Tuesday morning — we'll see if Leto was so good he was bad and so bad he was good.
