Five scenes that won actors their Oscars

One of the most entertaining parts of the Oscars each year is guessing which clip the Academy will choose to represent each nominated performance.

One of the most entertaining parts of the Oscars each year is guessing which clip the Academy will choose for each nominated performance. Will the ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Actress’ nominees cringe as a scene of them chewing the scenery plays out? Will the supporting actors look awkward as an unexpectedly emotional moment is shown in front of a room full of their peers?

In truth, cinephiles like to think they know which scenes the Academy will pick as the best representations of each actor’s performance. Sometimes their picks align with what is truly a star’s most fantastic scene in a film, but on other occasions, they are likely chosen for how they flow alongside other scenes included in the broadcast.

Sometimes, though, a movie scene is so memorable, beautifully realised, and wonderfully performed that it feels like it secured an actor their Oscar win all on its own. These are the scenes that got people talking after they left the cinema, and the ones that people watch repeatedly for years to come. These scenes mightn’t have been used in an Oscars clip, but they’re almost certainly the ones that pushed a star over the line when it came time to decide a winner.

From a coin toss fraught with deadly peril to a mother deciding to relinquish custody of her son, by way of a mentally ill woman taking perverse delight in toying with someone’s mind, here are five scenes that won actors their Oscars.

Five scenes that won actors their Oscars:

The coin toss (Javier Bardem, ‘No Country For Old Men’)

When Javier Bardem accepted his ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar for his chilling performance as Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men, he thanked the mercurial directors for believing in his ability to portray a dead-eyed psychopath in such a convincing way. Chigurh was a cinematic monster unlike any that had come before, and his scenes dripped with malice and an undercurrent of danger, even when he was simply talking to the owner of a gas station.

“What’s the most you’ve ever lost in a coin toss?” Chigurh’s unsettling hitman asks the poor, unsuspecting proprietor. By this point, audiences have already seen Chigurh strangle a sheriff’s deputy to death and shoot a random driver with a bolt pistol, so they know this seemingly innocent question won’t lead to anything good for the owner.

Chigurh’s stillness, calm delivery, implacable accent, bizarre haircut, and menacingly abstract musings all make for a scene that balances on a knife-edge without ever erupting into violence. It’s a tour de force from Bardem, and surely the scene that convinced the Academy he was taking home the gold. However, praise must also be reserved for Gene Jones, who expertly portrays the confusion and fear of a man who doesn’t truly know how close to death he just came, but he has an inkling.

Joanna’s change of heart (Meryl Streep, ‘Kramer vs Kramer’)

Meryl Streep’s first Oscar win came for her nuanced performance in the late Robert Benton’s legal drama Kramer vs Kramer. The 1979 film told the story of a New York City couple’s divorce, and the harrowing custody battle that followed for their seven-year-old son Billy, in such a sensitive, complex manner that it’s still the gold standard for this kind of movie more than 40 years later.

Streep won ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for playing Joanna Kramer, an unhappy wife and mother who tells her husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman) that she’s leaving home, but also walks out on her son at the same time. Throughout the film, Joanna goes from a woman suffering from mental health issues who abandons her son for 15 months, then returns and tries to wrestle custody of him back from the father who raised him through the turbulent time she was away. It’s an emotional rollercoaster that Streep always ensures stays on the rails.

Joanna is a complicated woman, and it would have been easy for the film and Streep’s performance to portray her as a villain, but that never happens because Benton and Streep go to great lengths to make Joanna sympathetic and real, despite what she did. Even her final scene, which I believe netted her the Oscar, is a clinic in how to pull off a difficult emotional balancing act without ever losing the audience or drifting into melodrama.

“King Kong ain’t got shit on me!” (Denzel Washington, ‘Training Day’)

The Oscars love to show clips of actors delivering fiery, impassioned monologues that showcase a star’s full emotional range. Most of these clips are from poignant dramas that tug at the heartstrings. However, when Denzel Washington won ‘Best Actor’ for his searing portrayal of Detective Alonzo Harris in the 2002 crime drama Training Day, his impassioned monologue came from a very different emotional place.

As Harris