Why Does The Academy Seem to Have It In For ‘SNL’ Stars?
With its ’70s-era production details and sprawling age-spanning ensemble, Saturday Night has high hopes for the Oscars this year. But if the Jason Reitman period piece manages to win one, it will achieve something that the cast it depicts never could.
Though Saturday Night Live has racked up a record-breaking 103 Emmys and churned out generational talent with regularity over its 50 seasons, only six among its more than 150 castmembers have ever been nominated for an Oscar (five if you don’t include one-episode-and-done player Laurie Metcalf).
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Its only winner? Robert Downey Jr., just this past March for Oppenheimer. And his 1985-86 SNL stint is a career footnote.
“I don’t think it’s conscious,” says Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger, an Oscar prognosticator and author of 50 Oscar Nights, “but there might be something going on. There’s obviously a disconnect between SNL and [film] awards.”
Comedy stars can struggle with the Academy, of course, especially if they stay in their comedy lane and don’t remake themselves as dramatic actors. But even by those standards, the SNL snubs are notable compared to the number of nominations received by non-SNL actors in comedies.
The trend dates all the way to 1981, when Laugh-In’s Goldie Hawn got cited for Private Benjamin, but SNL’s Chevy Chase and Bill Murray in Caddyshack and Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in The Blues Brothers were ignored.
Dudley Moore, who starred in a British comedy revue called Beyond the Fringe, received a best actor nomination for Arthur in 1981 while Eddie Murphy, the SNL supernova who left the show in 1984, couldn’t buy a nom for a remarkable big-star stretch that included 48 Hrs., Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop and Coming to America. (He received his only nomination two decades later, for a drama: Dreamgirls. Nearly all the other alums who’ve been nominated were for dramas, too — Aykroyd in Driving Miss Daisy and Murray in Lost in Translation, for example.)
For fans of these stars, it’s surprising and disappointing how persistent the trend can be. Tom Hanks, six years removed from his drag role on the sitcom Bosom Buddies, was tapped for the 1988 comedy Big. But Billy Crystal, who became famous for his Fernando “You Look Mahvelous” character on SNL and who’s hosted the Oscars nine times, is still waiting for his first nomination despite starring in such comedy classics as When Harry Met Sally and City Slickers.
More recent decades have not been any kinder to Lorne’s people. SNL heavyweights Mike Myers (Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery), Will Ferrell (Elf, Anchorman) and Tina Fey (Mean Girls) have never made the cut. Not so for former Talk Soup host Greg Kinnear (As Good as It Gets). Groundlings alum Melissa McCarthy got a nod for 2011’s Bridesmaids, but co-stars Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph (both SNL veterans) got no acting nods.
Ugly Betty star America Ferrera was cited for Barbie last year. SNL vet Kate McKinnon in the same film? Nothing.
It can sometimes seem as though the late night TV institution is like the Hotel California: You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Or at least, you can’t get far enough away to make the Academy see you differently.
Karger believes there’s something about not just the ubiquity of the show but its sketch-comedy nature that can predispose voters against it.
“I would imagine some voters look at an SNL alum and think, ‘Well, that person is just doing a longform silly sketch,’ ” he says. Sitcom and other stars wouldn’t encounter the same problem.
Those sketches have a way of following around an actor. Take Murray, a full 13 years removed from his last episode of SNL when he got overlooked for the 1993 comedy classic Groundhog Day. Even now, “Having traveled with Bill, I see so many people reach out to him still about Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters — which sort of came up from SNL — and the lounge singer, which was his most famous character from SNL,” says Gil Kenan, who wrote Saturday Night with Reitman and directed Murray and Aykroyd in the March release Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
That strong association, he adds, applies to any beloved SNL alum turned movie star: “Their international profiles may be defined by their films, but fundamentally they’re always going to have the building blocks of SNL in the other characters they play.”
And though Kenan believes that “there very well could be” a bias against anyone with an SNL background, he thinks it’s flat-out misguided. “The reason why the show is successful is because it’s a high-wire act with high stakes,” he says. “Now that I’ve worked with Bill and Dan and Kristen [on the 2021 holiday film A Boy Called Christmas], I can tell you these are some of the greatest actors. They cut their teeth on the show, so they approach their characters with the fearlessness that the show gave them. It’s an incredible tool.”
Laraine Newman, an original Not Ready for Prime Time Player from SNL (as seen in Saturday Night), says she finds the general anti-comedy trend dispiriting. Films like When Harry Met Sally, Bowfinger, Step Brothers and This Is 40, she noted, are unfairly shut out. “Comedies can be very intimate and truthful,” she says. “And they do have an original vision. Step Brothers had an original vision!”
But SNL stars may get the last laugh. With the demographics of the Academy now younger and more diverse as well as the voting body larger overall, “all the barriers and prejudices are disappearing,” Karger says. “Voters are going to be more receptive to different kinds of films and performances. We will see more nominations and wins from SNL alums in the future.” Chloe Fineman, call your agent.
This story first appeared in a November stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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