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Every year when the new Academy Award nominations are announced, that’s inevitably followed by people sharing what they believe was snubbed in the biggest categories. But there are also a handful of Oscar-related decisions that continue to be contested years after a ceremony happened. In my case, I believe The Shawshank Redemption, a movie packed with perfect moments, was more deserving of Best Picture at the 67th Academy Awards rather than Forrest Gump. Now Ryan Reynolds, who’s been crushing it on the 2024 movies schedule, has shared what he thinks is one of the Oscars’ “greatest injustices,” and now it has me wishing that Deadpool could use Cable’s time slider to fix this oversight.
During his visit to Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast, Reynolds, who’s coming off the critical and commercial success of Deadpool & Wolverine, the latest of the Marvel movies, ruled out that he and co-star Hugh Jackman will host the 97th Academy Awards, as they’re too busy. However, the actor did express his desire to see comedies recognized more at the Oscars, which led to him sharing what he considers an all-timer of a snub:
One of the greatest, most, greatest injustices is that Eddie Murphy doesn’t have an Oscar for The Nutty Professor.
Long considered one of Eddie Murphy’s best movies, The Nutty Professor, a remake of the same-named movie starring Jerry Lewis, saw the Saturday Night Live alum playing seven different roles, chief among them Professor Sherman Klump. The 1996 movie earned generally positive critical reception, with a lot of praise being directed towards Murphy’s various performances. It also did well enough to spawn the sequel Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, though that didn’t do nearly as well critically and commercially.
And yet, like Ryan Reynolds pointed out, Eddie Murphy wasn’t nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 69th Academy Awards. The only actor nominated that year in that category whose performance fell into comedic territory was Tom Cruise for Jerry Maguire, and that’s obviously a much different type of comedy compared to what Murphy was doing in The Nutty Professor. Murphy did net a Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy nomination at that year’s Golden Globes, but it would have been nice for him to get an Oscars nod, if not go home with the gold.
This is a problem that could easily be rectified if Reynolds’ Deadpool used the Time Slider he swiped from Cable to go back and… shall we say, persuade the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to ensure that Eddie Murphy won the Best Actor Oscar. Hey, the Merc with the Mouth used that time travel device to do things like save Vanessa Carlysle, shoot his Weapon XI counterpart from X-Men Origins: Wolverine and even travel to the main MCU reality, as seen in Deadpool & Wolverine. Surely this is a worthy task too, right? No? Alright, we’ll keep living in the reality where Geoffrey Rush won for Shine.
If you missed out on seeing Deadpool & Wolverine in theaters, it can be purchased digitally and on physical media now, and will be streamable with a Disney+ subscription starting November 12. Eddie Murphy’s latest movie, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, can be accessed with a Netflix subscription.