Brian Cox slams Oscars and questions industry’s biggest prize

Brian Cox, a classically trained Shakespearean actor who is highly acclaimed for his craft on screen and stage, recently shared his true feelings regarding Oscars.

While having a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter and reflecting on his career in the world of entertainment, the 78-year-old actor opened up about why he thought the Academy Awards were “nonsense.”

Cox quipped, “The Oscars are absolute nonsense because everything that’s judged in the Oscars, it’s not a year’s work. It’s just the work that comes out between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“I think it makes those awards a fallacy, quite honestly, because there’s a lot of other good work that goes on outside of what they call Oscar season,” the actor of Bourne Identity added.

Notably, Cox made these comments when asked about playing Winston Churchill in the 2017 movie Churchill, as that same year, Gary Oldman won a Best Actor Oscar for playing Churchill in Darkest Hour.

“Our film came out in the summer, and it was a relatively independent film, so you haven’t got the power of the studios behind it. So my film never even got a look, and I still think my performance is a better performance,” he remarked, referring to his craft in the film Churchill.

For the unversed, distributors usually release their films towards the end of the year in the hope of awards when voting occurs.

However, some films released earlier in the year have also been successful in securing nominations, and an example of it is this year’s Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, which came out in July last year.

Similarly, Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won seven major Oscars in 2023, was released in March 2022.

It is noteworthy to mention that Cox has stood victorious by earning two Laurence Olivier Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award, as well as a nomination for a British Academy Television Award.

On the professional front, he has lent his voice to Helm Hammerhand in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime fantasy film, which premiered on December 12, 2024.