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 assessing just how well music biopics actually fare at the Oscars.
The new Bruce Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, includes the following scenes, presented without commentary: a black-and-white flashback to an elementary school–age Bruce Springsteen at the edge of town, gazing poignantly upon a literal mansion on the hill; the Boss sitting in a library reading newspaper articles, seeking inspiration for his album Nebraska … with a zoom in on the word “Nebraska”; and a record executive then listening to the clearly great album we all know and love and calling it a “mistake.” Whether this sounds like a genuinely compelling portrayal of the crisis of the soul that birthed the incomparable American folk album or trite, treacly music biopic beats straight out of the Dewey Cox playbook, the aims of Deliver Me From Nowhere are clear: It wants to ride the backstreets all the way to an Oscar.
Deliver Me From Nowhere, directed by Scott Cooper, chronicles Springsteen’s efforts to record the spare, seminal Nebraska amid his personal struggles and alienation by fame—and his early attempts to put together what will become Born in the U.S.A. It features renditions of some of the most beloved American rock music of the 20th century—plus, it’s got period-specific costumes, accents, and Jeremy Strong (a man who would star in a biopic of your MAGA uncle if it could get him an Oscar). Sounds ripe for a tear through awards season, right? Despite all the appeal it has going for it on paper, the film has failed to connect with audiences and critics. Negative reviews have plagued the film since its premiere at Telluride, and its wide release over the weekend yielded a paltry $9 million, which was good for fourth at the box office, behind a Colleen Hoover adaptation. For reference, last year’s Bob Dylan flick, A Complete Unknown, grossed nearly that much in its first day.
Oscar Watch
But Deliver Me From Nowhere’s Oscar ambitions aren’t dead yet. While the film has all the hallmarks of a Best Picture hopeful, music biopics are especially seen as awards vehicles for their lead actors. Embodying the Boss for the film, Jeremy Allen White is running for the Oscar. (You might even say he was born to run.) With the Best Actor field pretty open outside of a couple of front-runners, it’s not unlikely that White will get a nod even if Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t recoup its budget. But the highway to actually winning the statuette might be a little more jammed than he thought.
First off, there’s one glaring issue with Deliver Me From Nowhere that may hurt its chances in the Best Actor category: Jeremy Allen White does not look like Bruce Springsteen. I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most trenchant analysis—and it wouldn’t really matter if the movie were better. But I’m just going off the Academy’s standards here! And those standards can sometimes, maybe, lean a tad surface-level. A stark resemblance to their real-life subjects has undoubtedly helped previous actors make a case that they “disappeared” into their biopic roles. Think Timothée Chalamet’s chameleonic Dylan impression that rivaled only Cate Blanchett’s and got him a musical guest slot on Saturday Night Live, or Austin Butler’s guyliner and shiny bronzer that morphed him into late-career Elvis. Hell, Rami Malek threw on some dentures (and didn’t even bother singing) to play Freddie Mercury, and it won him an Oscar! A physical transformation goes a long way, and, brown contacts notwithstanding, White didn’t exactly make himself over for the role. He did capture Bruce’s gruff singing voice with wildly pinpoint accuracy—and 20th Century Studios has certainly been promoting that feat in the press during White’s awards campaign. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for that to be enough for a nomination. But even as he’s howling through “Born in the U.S.A.,” you can’t help but feel like he’s about to cuss out his cousin or smoke a cigarette with Rosalía. Is it silly to reward a performance for essentially being an impressive cosplay? Of course! That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
But even if White nailed Bruce’s look and Deliver Me From Nowhere crushed at the box office, it wouldn’t guarantee that the actor would be rewarded with an Oscar. Take those other recent music biopics, for example: A Complete Unknown and Elvis. Both Chalamet and Butler were in neck and neck races for the Oscar that were decided at the buzzer—with the former declaring his pursuit to become “one of the greats” as he accepted the SAG Award and the latter taking home the Golden Globe and the BAFTA. Both actors underwent the kind of outwardly transformative makeovers that you’d think the Academy would love to reward—plus, both films were box office successes. But Chalamet lost the Oscar to The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody, and Butler got beaten out by The Whale’s Brendan Fraser, signifying the Academy’s potential shift away from rewarding actors playing dress-up as our favorite rock stars and toward more straightforwardly “ambitious” original characters.
In fact, despite its reputation as one of the bait-iest genres, the music biopic has never really been the awards cheat code it’s cracked up to be. Throughout Academy Awards history, there has been the odd music biopic that established itself as a contender—like 1980’s Coal Miner’s Daughter, which won Sissy Spacek a statuette for her portrayal of Loretta Lynn. But the 21st century saw an influx of these films, especially after Jamie Foxx won a Best Actor Oscar for playing Ray Charles in 2004’s Ray. The following year saw Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon land nominations for the Johnny Cash–based Walk the Line (the latter won), and Marion Cotillard took home a prize for her role as Édith Piaf in 2007’s La Vie en Rose, but no other films bore fruit at the Academy Awards even as many others made attempts at the genre in the late 2000s and 2010s. (Some examples that may be lodged in the deepest recesses of your brain: 2009’s Notorious, which portrayed Biggie’s life and death; 2009’s Nowhere Boy, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a pre-fame John Lennon; 2010’s The Runaways, starring a mid-Twilight Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett; 2013’s Jimi: All Is by My Side, starring a then-increasingly reclusive André 3000 as Jimi Hendrix; and 2014’s Clint Eastwood–directed Jersey Boys, which chronicled the Four Seasons.)
An actor repping the music biopic genre didn’t take home any hardware again until Malek’s infamous victory for 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, one of the most egregious Oscar wins in recent memory. (Not helped by the fact that Malek’s Oscar clip was literally just lip-syncing—maybe that’s why the Academy has rarely shown clips during the ceremony since then?) The backlash to that award was swift and has persisted ever since. (I’m still mad that Malek won over Bradley Cooper in A Star Is Born—not only is it a more impressive musical performance, but we could’ve saved Cooper a lot of sweat in his relentless pursuit of an Oscar, and he could’ve reined in his own music biopic.) Malek is frequently cited among the worst Oscar winners due to his shallow performance and the film’s reputation as a particularly clichéd and shoddily assembled biopic. Outside of Renée Zellweger’s Best Actress win the following year for Judy (a Judy Garland–based film that doesn’t totally fit into the music biopic genre), the Academy hasn’t awarded any musician mimicry ever since, even when there have been legitimate contenders like Elvis and A Complete Unknown. Others, like Rocketman, Bob Marley: One Love, and Back to Black, came and went without a single acting nomination. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bohemian Rhapsody fallout has made the Academy reluctant to go back to the music biopic well.
How many times will an actor have to lose the Oscar, though, before the music biopic bubble actually bursts? The genre is certainly the butt of a lot of jokes—these days, it’s pretty much impossible to have a famous actor pretend to find a spark of inspiration to write a recognizable song and then face some kind of crisis along the way without drawing comparisons to Walk Hard. The films are middling at best and don’t even result in that sought-after trophy all that often, yet the genre is still viewed as a get-Oscars-quick scheme. (And filmmakers are not letting up: Sam Mendes’s four Beatles biopics are still on the horizon.) While biographical films in general still tend to take home statuettes (like Oppenheimer and King Richard), the current leaders in the Best Actor race—Leonardo DiCaprio for One Battle After Another and Chalamet for Marty Supreme—show that the Academy might be far more interested in largely original characters this year. White certainly has a shot at landing a nomination, but Deliver Me From Nowhere’s thud at the box office might signal that the genre is on its last legs. Maybe that’s wishful thinking—after all, everything that dies comes back someday—but for now, let’s enjoy the last-chance power drive of performances more compelling than rock star impersonations.
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: One Battle After Another is so good that they’re calling a $130 million Warner Bros. picture an indie film—it led the Gotham Awards nominations with a record six nods. Meanwhile, Weapons’ release on HBO Max has people prepping their Aunt Gladys Halloween costumes—and it’s put Amy Madigan back in the Best Supporting Actress race. Benicio del Toro might be drinking a few small beers at the Oscars this year, as Gold Derby saw his Best Supporting Actor odds surge this week.
Stock down: A House of Dynamite made its streaming debut on Netflix last week and was almost immediately met with complaints from the Pentagon over inaccuracies. Jeremy Strong’s Best Supporting Actor campaign is DOA after Deliver Me From Nowhere’s flop at the box office—surely Mark Zuckerberg will get him that statuette. Zootopia 2 was looking like it could be a challenger for Best Animated Feature … until the KPop Demon Hunters phenomenon was so undeniable that it made AMC actually agree to put a Netflix movie in its theaters. Better luck next year, Disney.
