Are the Oscars trolling Donald Sutherland?
He has never received a competitive Oscar. In fact, the Canadian has never even been nominated for one, despite terrific performances in at least a dozen great films by directors such as Robert Altman, Federico Fellini, Nicolas Roeg, Alan J. Pakula and Robert Redford. But, if you're a regular Oscar watcher, you may have noticed him some years. While the winners walked to the stage for their trophies, he was the anonymous voice saying stuff like, "Sound editor Sue Smith has been a fan of the movies ever since she saw my naked butt in the classic comedy, "Animal House.' " (This example was invented for illustrative purposes.)
Although the Academy Awards did finally give him one of those sorry-we've-ignored-your-entire-career lifetime achievement honors four years ago, that still doesn't explain how one of our finest, subtlest actors has never gotten so much as a whiff of a real Oscar.
If you think of an actor's tools as the person's voice and physical presence, Sutherland seems limited; there's no disguising those pale eyes, his elongated face or that silvery voice. But he has played a wide variety of characters with subtlety and conviction, including the supportive coach who invented a new kind of running shoe in the beautiful "Without Limits," the heedless sensualist in "Casanova," the vicious politician in "The Hunger Games," the naive accountant in "The Day of the Locust" and the glib one-percenter in "Six Degrees of Separation."
I'm a fan of Sutherland but it wasn't until I scrolled through his more than a half-century's worth of credits that I added up how many wonderful movies he's been in. That's a tribute to his taste and to his capacity for storytelling.
Sutherland has been the lead in plenty of movies, particularly in his '70s heyday, but you'd never call them "Donald Sutherland movies" because his performances don't call attention to themselves. Which, by the way, is why he's never been nominated for an Oscar. To paraphrase something often said about movie composers, the best Sutherland acting is when you don't notice he's acting.
Sutherland has been in his share of bad movies, too, but it's always worth finding out how he builds a performance — when he chooses to emphasize a character detail, how he uses his physicality (he's 6 feet 4) and what his eyes are telling us about his character's relationship to the people around him.
Paying attention to what he's doing is always a good strategy, especially in a blah movie like the serial killer drama "The Calling," or HBO's recent "The Undoing." If another actor or a bit of dialogue seems fake, shift your attention to Sutherland, and he'll show you something to believe.