Tom Cruise Wants the Oscar: The Academy Isn't Watching

The *Digger* awards campaign launched this week and Warner Bros. is doing what Warner Bros. does — throwing money at a problem and hoping prestige follows. The problem is Tom Cruise, which sounds wrong until you sit with it for a moment. Tom Cruise is the last genuine movie star, the last person who can open a film on name alone, who does his own stunts with the specific energy of someone who has decided mortality is optional. And he has never won an Oscar. Not once. In a career that spans four decades and more than a few performances that deserved at least a conversation, the Academy has looked at Tom Cruise and consistently chosen someone else.

*Digger* is the campaign's bet that this is finally the year the conversation changes. Whether the film earns it is a separate question from whether the machine around it can manufacture the right conditions — and awards season is always, at its core, about the machine. The screenings, the trade coverage, the carefully timed profiles in the right magazines, the careful performance of humility from someone who has never looked humble in his life and that's precisely what makes him interesting. Cruise navigating an awards circuit is a category error in motion. He exists to run across rooftops. Being asked to sit in a room and be grateful for consideration is its own kind of stunt.

The box office reality is that *Digger* has not had the run that makes an awards push automatic. Meanwhile, *Spider-Man: Brand New Day* became the highest-grossing domestic release in cinema history this week — $936.7 million — which tells you everything about where the money is and absolutely nothing about where the trophies go. Those are two different industries wearing the same industry's clothes.

And somewhere in the middle of all this sits *The Pitt*, which won six Emmys and gave us Shawn Hatosy at fifty being described in GQ as a sex symbol, which is perhaps the most quietly satisfying sentence this awards season has produced. There is something worth admiring about a show that does actual medical drama — the kind that earns its tension rather than manufacturing it — and gets rewarded for it.

The Amanda Seyfried and Thomas Sadoski split landed quietly. Nine years. Two people who kept almost everything private, which in this industry is its own form of rebellion.

The verdict: Tom Cruise will campaign beautifully and lose gracefully, and the performance of losing gracefully will be the best thing he's done all year.