Welcome to Statue Season! Each week leading up to the 98th Academy Awards ceremony, we’ll be checking in on the closest races, the winningest narratives, and the plain old movie magic that will decide who’s taking home the gold on March 15, 2026. This week, we’re taking a look at the Rock’s case for Best Actor.
“It was my honor to transform in this role for my director Benny Safdie,” Dwayne Johnson wrote on Instagram Monday, accompanied by a photo of him in his Smashing Machine prosthetics—eyebrows thickened, cauliflower ear poking out behind a wig. “Thank you brother for believing in me. Truth is this film has changed my life.” His verbiage had all the signifiers of a scrounging everyman finally given their big break—not exactly that of a historically highly paid actor addressing his somber little A24 film that scraped up a mere $6 million in its opening weekend. But this is Oscar brain, people—it doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to push a narrative. And a strong narrative is enough to make a beefed-up box office king like Johnson look like an underdog in comparison to his highbrow competitors come March.
The Smashing Machine is Safdie’s chronicle of MMA fighter and gentle giant Mark Kerr (Johnson), an early participant in the nascent UFC. Set at the turn of the 21st century, the film focuses on Kerr’s opioid addiction and recovery and his tumultuous relationship with then-girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt). It hits the familiar beats of a biopic with some sense of an elevated feel, thanks to Safdie’s inventive filmmaking and a stunning score by Nala Sinephro. But the film is beaten down by thinly drawn characters and a meandering pace. As a result, The Smashing Machine isn’t exactly changing the hierarchy of power in any cinematic universe: In addition to its TKO by Taylor Swift and Paul Thomas Anderson at the box office last weekend, it’s gotten mediocre reviews from critics and holds underwhelming average scores on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and Letterboxd.
But in regard to Johnson’s Oscar campaign—one that started picking up steam way back when the first stills of the Rock in character as Kerr made the rounds in August 2024—does any of that matter? Does the fact that the movie isn’t all that great actually have an effect on his chances of taking home the Best Actor statuette in March? A few instances in Academy Awards history tell us … maybe not.
The Rock is angling for what I’ll call the Career Reinvention Oscar. (My Ringer colleague Helena Hunt broke down the specifics of a successful career reinvention back in August. She already had her eyes on Johnson’s then-upcoming turn in The Smashing Machine as a potential candidate.) This Oscar is given to an actor whose work was previously deemed unworthy—usually lowbrow blockbuster comedies or action schlock that would never be considered for an Academy Award nomination—or one who’s generally coming back from some kind of down period and then gives Serious™ films a shot and wows everyone with some capital-A Acting. (A physical transformation goes a long way, too—bonus points if there are headlines describing you as “unrecognizable” in your Oscar-hopeful role.) Johnson traded in the CGI slop of Jumanji and Red One for 16 mm grain and an A24 production card. He’s basically back in that Black Adam meeting room, only this time he’s plotting his path to an Oscar.
Is the Career Reinvention Oscar backhanded? Absolutely! The basis of the award is essentially that the Academy never thought the actor in question would make something that didn’t suck! But despite the abasement required—and the relative recency of the phenomenon—the Career Reinvention Oscar has already proved to be successful in providing actors with a clear-cut avenue to a statuette. Some of the most dominant campaigns of the past decade-plus were of the career reinvention ilk: Ke Huy Quan’s and Robert Downey Jr.’s respective supporting wins for Everything Everywhere All at Once and Oppenheimer were versions of it, and both actors absolutely tore through their awards seasons, with each winning both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award; Demi Moore rode the narrative all throughout last year’s awards cycle for The Substance, winning the Golden Globe, SAG Award, and Critics’ Choice Award before falling just short of the Oscar; and even Will Smith’s win for 2021’s King Richard fell into the career reinvention category—and if he decides to play the Academy’s game once more in, say, 10 years, he’ll have the chance to use the narrative again!
More on ‘The Smashing Machine’
The career reinvention narrative has also been strong enough to propel a performance in a movie that wasn’t even all that great to begin with. Take recent Career Reinvention Oscar recipient Brendan Fraser, for 2022’s The Whale. That movie was fully riding on the Fraser comeback hype—I mean, the entire marketing campaign was basically just that one frame of Fraser in prosthetics as the overweight lead character. But it was enough for Fraser to land the SAG Award, the Critics’ Choice Award, and eventually the Best Actor Oscar, even as The Whale was marred by negative reviews and accusations of fatphobia. Go back a bit further, and you’ll find Matthew McConaughey’s coronation for his role in 2013’s Dallas Buyers Club as a real-life rodeo cowboy who was diagnosed with AIDS—a career reinvention so strong they actually named it. The film was generally well-received at the time, pretty much solely due to the McConaughey buzz, but it was largely criticized for the decision to cast a cisgender man (Jared Leto) as a transgender woman. Ultimately, Dallas Buyers Club was forgotten pretty quickly—I don’t think there are many people who would go back and still give the Oscar to McConaughey over Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the best movie performances of the century. But the McConaissance was so unbeatable back then that McConaughey all right, all right, all right’ed his way through awards season.
All that said, Johnson’s performance in The Smashing Machine is quieter and less showy than what we’re accustomed to in the career reinvention milieu. Even if the films they won their statues for aren’t all that well-remembered, Fraser and McConaughey turned in the kind of big, melodramatic performances that the Academy loves to reward. (Think: lots of crying and yelling.) Aside from a heartbreaking hospital scene opposite Ryan Bader that would certainly serve as the Rock’s Oscar clip (if they still have them), the film’s weak script and ambient vibe don’t allow Johnson to hit the emotional highs that would normally serve as evidence of his newfound serious acting skills. He does well with the limited material, but that might not be enough to live up to the Academy’s idea of a career reinvention.
What could also end up knocking the Rock out of contention is that darn box office. The Whale and Dallas Buyers Club were both fairly low-budget indies that by no means had people racing to theaters, but they both made pretty impressive returns for their caliber. Those movies piqued the interest of audiences due to the buzz around those “revelatory” lead performances—but people need to actually see the movie in the first place for buzz to build, especially when Johnson could be going up against some competitors who fared better at the box office. Gold Derby saw the Rock’s Best Actor odds tank this week after The Smashing Machine’s minuscule opening weekend return—it now has DiCaprio in the lead after a decent second weekend for One Battle After Another, with Michael B. Jordan as a dark horse still riding off the runaway success of Sinners.
Still, if The Smashing Machine doesn’t gain steam and Johnson manages to take home a statue in March anyway, it wouldn’t be the first time a movie that barely made a dent at the box office went on to become a significant Oscar player. (The Smashing Machine has already outgrossed 2021 Best Picture winner CODA, which made less than $2 million.) And many of the films that The Smashing Machine could be going up against in the Best Actor category haven’t even come out yet. (Keep an eye on Wagner Moura for The Secret Agent and Timothée Chalamet, who’s starting to ramp up what may be an unbeatable hype machine for Marty Supreme.) But that The Smashing Machine came out this early in awards season and is already struggling to gain traction doesn’t bode well. Surely the Rock will maintain his commitment to serious cinema after this anyway, though, right? Sigh … maybe the live-action Moana will be more complex than we thought?
Stock Watch
To paraphrase one of cinema’s great stockbrokers: Nobody knows if an Oscar stock is going to go up, down, sideways, or in circles. In this section, we’ll evaluate who’s on the up-and-up and whose momentum is sputtering out as the competition across categories heats up.
Stock up: If you even merely dabble in Film Twitter, your feed was probably plastered with glowing reviews for Marty Supreme after its premiere at the New York Film Festival this week. Teyana Taylor started making noise in some Best Supporting Actress predictions thanks to the continued success of One Battle After Another (and a shout-out from Taylor Swift), while Chase Infiniti, in some intriguing maneuvering, set her sights on the Best Actress category. The positive reception to Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon at NYFF and TIFF has Ethan Hawke circling the Best Actor conversation.
Stock down: Emily Blunt’s Best Supporting Actress campaign tapped out following The Smashing Machine’s lackluster return at the box office. Last week’s new trailer for Wicked: For Good once again made Oz look perpetually overcast. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere continues its run of middling reviews with its screening at NYFF—perhaps society is finally ready to move past the music biopic genre?
