Oscars 2020: Brad Pitt Won, and Its About Time – GQ

Brad Pitt, at 56, is an Oscar winner for the second time. His prior win came only six years ago, for helping produce 12 Years a Slave, and his victory tonight, for his performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is his first for his onscreen work. An entire career is a long time to wait just ask Al Pacino, runner-up to Pitt tonight, who has been nominated and lost so many times that he sometimes forgets the exact number. (Nine total is the answer, and only one win.) But Pitt, lately, has seemed to make an art of waiting and watching. Your own wins and lossesthe older you get, they don't seem like so much of a win or so much of a loss, he told me last year.

Despite 2019 having been an uncommonly good year for movies, the Academy Awards have had a kind of leaden, preordained feel to them for months now (until *Parasite*'s shocking best picture upset, anyway), as Joaquin Phoenix and 1917 marched through various precursor and guild awards shows, collecting one prize after another. Pitt, too, has been part of this march, though hes done it with flair (so much flair, in fact, that some have started speculating about who is writing his acceptance speech jokes) and, on at least one occasion, with the worlds most redundant nametag on. But there is nevertheless something satisfying, and maybe even surprising, about Pitts win.

Hes been nominated three times before, twice in the best actor category; his win for supporting actor will provide even more evidence for those that like to say that hes a character actor cloaked in the seductive guise of a leading man. But Pitt has always been one of Hollywoods great reactors and scene partners, and hes a different performer now than he was even a few years agomore relaxed, more confident; his many years of living in the spotlight have, paradoxically, sanded away whatever artifice or showiness there was in his work. Hes taught himself to listen and do less. He told me that hes constantly working on finding strength in vulnerability, in life and in acting: the real confidence, as he described it, that comes from really knowing yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses.

Since briefly meeting him for a profile last year, I have tried, without much success, to explain to friends the energy that Pitt brings to a room these days. Everyone is looking at him. And yet the feeling you get is one of total freedom. Hes learned to use the space between him and everyone else to his advantage. Hes got great comic timing, but he also can depend on the fact that youll wait. In Once Upon a Time, his character, Cliff Booth, is a washed-up stuntman and a professional friend and gopher to Leonardo DiCaprios Rick Dalton, but hes accepted his lot. Hes even, like Pitt himself, found the humor in it, the silver lining, the gift of no more expectations. Its an incredibly funny performance, an obscurely sad one, and at times its also menacing and violent; it channels a kind of blithe masculinity that is right on the edge between zen and nihilism. As Booth, Pitt has your attention; he knows that for a fact. How could he not? So he lets you come to him, even as he makes no guarantees about your safety once you get there.

Its not a performance he couldve given even a few years ago, I dont think. He had to give it up, almost, to get back to it. There was just too much emphasis on finding interesting characters, he told me about his previous life in Hollywood. I went, Fuck me, man. Live an interesting life and the rest will take care of itself. Now hes got the trophy to show for it.

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Oscars 2020: Brad Pitt Won, and Its About Time - GQ