Academy Award for Best Actor
Award presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Academy Award for Best Actor is an award presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It has been awarded since the 1st Academy Awards to an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance in a leading role in a film released that year. The award is traditionally presented by the previous year's Best Actress winner.
Academy Award for Best Actor | |
---|---|
Awarded for | Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role |
Country | United States |
Presented by | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) |
First awarded | 1929 |
Most recent winner | Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer (2024) |
Most awards | Daniel Day-Lewis (3) |
Most nominations | Laurence Olivier and Spencer Tracy (9) |
Website | oscars |
The Best Actor award has been presented 96 times, to 86 actors. The first winner was German actor Emil Jannings for his roles in The Last Command (1928) and The Way of All Flesh (1927).[1] The most recent winner is Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer (2023), who simultaneously became the first Irish actor to win this award. Italian actor Roberto Benigni gave the first winning non-English performance in Life Is Beautiful (1997) in this category. The record for most wins is three, held by Daniel Day-Lewis, while nine other actors have won twice. The record for most nominations is nine, jointly held by Spencer Tracy and Laurence Olivier. James Dean remains the only actor to have been posthumously nominated for this award more than once. At the 5th Academy Awards, Fredric March finished one vote ahead of Wallace Beery; under the rules of the time, this meant both actors were awarded, in this category's only tie.
Nominees are currently determined by single transferable vote within the actors branch of AMPAS; winners are selected by a plurality vote from the entire eligible voting members of the Academy.[2]
In the first three years of the awards, actors and actresses were nominated as the best individuals in their categories. At that time, all of their work during the qualifying period (as many as three films, in some cases) was listed after the award.[3] Despite this, at the 3rd Academy Awards, held in 1930, only one film was cited in each winner's award regardless of how many they were eligible to be considered for during that span.[4] The current system, in which an actor is nominated for a specific performance in a single film, was introduced for the 4th Academy Awards.[3] Starting with the 9th Academy Awards, held in 1937, the category was limited to a maximum five nominations per year.[3]