Tom Cruise Getting An Oscar For Top Gun: Maverick And Fans Are Not Happy?
Tom Cruise is a front-runner for an Academy Award and fans think he should have gotten one long ago.
This article is more than 2 years old
For a few years in the 2010s, it seemed like Tom Cruise’s star power had finally waned. After the disappointments of Jack Reacher and American Made and the colossal misfire of The Mummy, it took the unexpected, enormous success of Top Gun: Maverick to re-cement his place as perhaps the greatest movie star of his generation. Unsurprisingly, Tom Cruise is now a front-runner for an Academy Award nomination for his Top Gun sequel but, very surprisingly, it seems some people aren’t too happy about that idea.
According to a recent forecast in The Hollywood Reporter, Tom Cruise is predicated to snag a Best Actor Academy Award for Top Gun: Maverick, along with Brendan Fraser (The Whale), Austin Butler (Elvis), Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin), and Gabriel LaBelle (The Fabelmans). However, while Top Gun: Maverick may have been a critical darling and a commercial behemoth, there are a lot of people who are not on board with that notion.
The Twitter commentators who are against the idea of Tom Cruise receiving an Academy Award for Top Gun: Maverick generally fall into two camps: those who think he did not do a very good job of reprising the role of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and those who think he should have gotten an Oscar a long time ago.
In all fairness, Tom Cruise has already been nominated for an Academy Award three separate times, twice for Best Actor and once for Best Supporting Actor. His first chance at Oscar gold came in 1990 with the Vietnam War drama Born on the Fourth of July, which he lost to Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot. The second time around, it was for 1997’s Jerry Maguire, for which he was defeated by Geoffrey Rush in Shine. Finally, in 2000, his acclaimed performance in the Paul Thomas Anderson ensemble drama Magnolia lost out to Kevin Spacey in the Sam Mendes movie American Beauty.
Could this finally be Tom Cruise’s year to win an Academy Award? At this point, the 60-year-old actor has largely moved away from the kind of glossy drama work favored by the Academy and toward franchise action like his long-running Mission: Impossible series, so this might be one of his last chances. Also, Tom Cruise’s apparent obsession with risking his life in increasingly wild stunts means there is always the chance he floats off into space like Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey before he even gets an honorary Academy Award.
Currently, Tom Cruise is set to return to the role of Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and Part Two, neither of which are likely to nab him an Academy Award nomination (at least for acting). Reportedly, Cruise wants to be the first actor to do stunts in actual space and is partnering up with both NASA and private aerospace companies in order to do so. So if we are ever going to give Tom Cruise an Academy Award, we better do it before he finally leaves for space.
