Of the Last 25 Best Actor Oscar Winners, Only These 5 Actually Deserved It

The Academy Awards are the ultimate celebration of cinema. Held at the beginning of each year and given out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Oscars have been around for almost a hundred years, recognizing some of the best actors in the business with the coveted statuette. From Marlon Brando's all-time great wins for On the Waterfront and The Godfather to Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the Best Actor Oscar is filled with iconic names delivering career-best work.

Things are a lot more dire when looking at the Best Actor winners of the 21st century so far. Nothing against these actors, many of whom have delivered spectacular performances throughout their careers. However, some of the Academy's choices, especially throughout the 2010s, range from the confusing to the outright ugly. It's not all bad, though, as some actors genuinely earned the right to step onto the podium and receive the Oscar for their efforts. Still, it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that over half of the last 25 Best Actor winners have aged quite poorly. However, the five actors on this list rightfully and deservedly won the Oscar, and their victories will only get better with the benefit of age and hindsight.

Denzel Washington - 'Training Day' (2001)

The 21st century started with a bang, rewarding one of the most explosive and unforgettable performances in modern cinema. Denzel Washington stars in Antoine Fuqua's Training Day as Alonzo Harris, a corrupt cop who agrees to take ambitious LAPD officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) on a one-day evaluation to determine if he has what it takes to join the narcotics squad. What follows is a game of psychological games as Harris shows his true nature as a violent and corrupt despot.

In Training Day, Washington gives one of the great villain performances of the 21st century. There's an undeniable element of showmanship to his work, as Harris parades himself around his territory, flexing his muscles and reveling in the control he exerts over everything and everyone. Yet, Washington never forgets the character's true nature. The actor, one of the best of his generation, embodies the chaos that is Alonzo; he doesn't merely act out the violence, but rather becomes it. The 2001-2002 awards season was one for the history books, with Washington losing almost every major precursor yet still walking away with the Oscar. While it came as a surprise at the time, his victory seems like a no-brainer today. In Training Day, Washington is a hurricane of brutality in a performance that reminds everyone why he is one of the titans of the silver screen.

Adrien Brody - 'The Pianist' (2002)

The Pianist is not for the faint of heart. A challenging experience from beginning to end, the film chronicles the life of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), Warsaw's leading piano player in the days leading to the Nazi invasion of Poland. As he's forced into the Warsaw Ghetto before being separated from his family during Operation Reinhard, Szpilman must hide in the ruins of a now-destroyed Warsaw.

Roger Ebert said it best in his review for the film: what sets The Pianist apart from other World War II movies — and by extension, also distinguishes Brody's performance — is that it doesn't portray Szpilman as a hero or martyr but rather as a survivor. In the movie's eyes, the strength Szpilman needed to stay alive in such dire circumstances was just as admirable as the one needed to hold a gun and march to the frontlines. Brody embodies this approach with a performance that blends resignation with purpose — not to avenge those he lost or even to go back to the life he once knew but simply to see another day. There's a weariness to his work, a physicality that shows his body might be close to breaking, but his spirit isn't. Yet, Brody eschews sentimentality; he, like Szpilman, is not seeking admiration but rather understanding. Brody would win a second Oscar 21 years later, but The Pianist remains the crowning achievement of his career.

Philip Seymour Hoffman - 'Capote' (2005)

Truman Capote is a tricky character to play, mainly because, by now, he's perceived more as an idea than an actual human being. Like other similar figures — think Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, or even Julia Child — Capote is limited by his status as an icon of a very specific time and place. Thus, it's very easy for actors to play him on a surface level. Tom Hollander and Toby Jones both did brilliant work as Capote, nailing the voice and the mannerisms, but they're still playing our idea of Capote.

Perhaps that's what makes the late Philip Seymour Hoffman's work in 2005's Capote so enthralling; he's also playing our idea of Capote, but he laces it with a heavy coat of sardonic irony and latent melancholy. Hoffman was simply incapable of playing a character on a surface level, finding the same empathy in Scotty J's misery as he did in Sandy Lyle's delusion. In Capote, Hoffman laughs at the irony central to the infamous writer's very existence while simultaneously shedding a tear for it. His Truman is cruel and self-serving yet desperate and tortured, a modern-day jester who is equal parts enthralling and sad while captivating the New York elite. Capote was all surface, but Hoffman couldn't be more profound in his portrayal, crafting a fascinating look into a writer who, more than anything, wanted his life to be stranger than fiction.

Daniel Day-Lewis - 'There Will Be Blood' (2007)

Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1926 novel Oil! is widely regarded as one of the best movies of the 21st century, and it's in no small measure thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis. There Will Be Blood tells the tale of Daniel Plainview, an ambitious prospector seeking fortune during the California oil boom of the late 19th century. Soon, his ruthless efforts lead to a clash with a young preacher, embarking on an ideological crusade against him.

A strong contender for the best male performance of the 21st century so far, Day-Lewis' work in There Will Be Blood is the stuff of acting dreams, the type of work that's studied, distilled, and revered for years to come. Daniel Plainview is capitalism embodied, and Day-Lewis is unflinching in his depiction of such brutality. There's something simultaneously terrifying and majestic about his performance, and Day-Lewis, ever willing to explore the darkest sides of humanity, goes headfirst into Plainview's broken outlook of the world. His work is beyond monstrous, becoming outright mythical; neither Day-Lewis nor Anderson is interested in condemning Daniel, instead showing him as a corruptive force of nature as inherent to this world as the oil he's so obsessed with finding. Few character studies have ever captured the erosion of the soul with as much intensity or depth.

Cillian Murphy - 'Oppenheimer' (2023)

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a true modern masterpiece, quite possibly the best-regarded thriller since The Silence of the Lambs. Chronicling the career of the so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb, Oppenheimer opts for a thriller approach to disrupt the traditional biopic formula, mounting the scientist's contribution to the Manhattan Project and the aftermath of his actions with a distinct and latent sense of gloom and anxiety. At its heart is a towering Cillian Murphy delivering the performance of his career as the conflicted and increasingly tortured Oppenheimer.

If Oppenheimer is an exercise in mounting dread, then Murphy is the ticking clock at the heart of it. The actor, a long-time collaborator of Nolan, steps into the spotlight with a performance of remarkable humanity and exposed vulnerability beneath a veneer of tenuous stoicism. Murphy's expressive eyes tremble with the hope of discovery and the terror of uncertainty, his back slowly bending to the weight of his destructive actions. It's a masterclass in subtlety; the Irish actor says more with the twitch of an eye than many other actors do with elaborate monologues. By opting for a subdued approach, Murphy achieves a performance of enduring power, the grounding rock upon which Nolan builds his propulsive, ambitious epic. In only a few years from now, Oppenheimer will be remembered as a true classic, and it's largely thanks to Cillian Murphy.