For most people, Russell Crowe broke into the American film scene as detective Bud White in 1997’s L.A. Confidential. It was an ideal marriage of actor and role: the burly, snub-nosed Crowe playing a crooked L.A. cop waking up to the breadth of the police’s corruption and raging accordingly. But for the Australian Crowe, who’d been starring in movies Down Under since 1990, his actual breakthrough came in the junky 1995 sci-fi action flick Virtuosity. There, Crowe played a futuristic serial killer named SID (which stands for “Sadistic, Intelligent, Dangerous,” naturally) with the twist being that he’s a creature of pure virtual reality being hunted by a disgraced cop played by Denzel Washington. At the time, no one knew that Russell Crowe would go on to be one of the most impactful actors of the early 21st century, nor that Crowe and Washington’s careers would intersect in myriad ways over the subsequent 30 years.
In 2001, Crowe would win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Maximus, the Roman general turned slave turned hero of Gladiator. The following year, Denzel Washington would win his second Academy Award — and first for Best Actor — for his thunderous turn as a (sound familiar?) crooked L.A. cop in Training Day. The win took on added significance owing to its surrounding circumstances: Washington became only the second Black Best Actor winner ever, after Sidney Poitier, who received an honorary Oscar that same night, all at the same ceremony where Halle Berry became the first (and to date still only) Black woman to win Best Actress.
That’s a lot of Oscar history happening in the span of two years, a Jenga tower of cause and effect that would topple if even one block got removed. Like, for example, if Russell Crowe never won that Best Actor Oscar for Gladiator, a development that would alter the course of Oscars history, Hollywood history — heck, even American history.
2001: Russell Crowe loses the Best Actor Oscar for Gladiator
The most pressing question in this case: Why? Crowe winning the Oscar for Gladiator made sense. He was the star of the Best Picture winner. The role leveled him up from a respected actor in movies like L.A. Confidential and The Insider to a bona fide Hollywood leading man. His biggest competition — Tom Hanks, who’d lost an alarming amount of weight to play a marooned FedEx employee in Cast Away — was representing a movie that was not universally beloved (Hanks was one of only two nominations the film received). Plus Hanks was already a two-time Oscar winner. Still, he had won the Golden Globe, while Crowe hadn’t won any major precursor award yet.
What Crowe did have in his corner was a growing sense of inevitability, both as an Oscar winner and a movie star. While the Gladiator Oscar campaign was chugging along in the fall of 2000, Crowe was dealing with tabloid reports of an affair with Meg Ryan on the set of Proof of Life, one which helped precipitate her breakup from Dennis Quaid, so the narrative went. Then there was the news about the FBI tracking a kidnapping plot in which Crowe was the target. In subsequent years, it would come out that it was Al Qaeda plotting to kidnap Crowe and ransom him for millions. While a tabloid scandal and a terrorist plot don’t seem like fuel for a winning Oscar campaign, all of it contributed to Crowe’s image as a throwback to the days when Hollywood leading men were virile and larger than life. The received wisdom among Oscar punditry at the time was that even if Crowe didn’t win for Gladiator, he’d likely triumph the next year, as he had Ron Howard’s biopic A Beautiful Mind waiting down the road.
So maybe voters took the possibility of giving Crowe an Oscar next year to heart. What if the Proof of Life rumors did turn some voters off? What if the kidnapping story never broke in the press, taking away enough sympathetic votes to tilt the contest to Hanks? Where do things go from there?
2002: Russell Crowe (A Beautiful Mind) wins Best Actor over Denzel Washington (Training Day)
If Crowe goes on to win the Best Actor Oscar in 2002 for A Beautiful Mind, that means Washington doesn’t win for Training Day. Suddenly, despite the fact that he already won Best Supporting Actor for 1989’s Glory, Washington is overdue for an Oscar as a leading man. And the Academy has egg on their face for setting up a moment for Black Hollywood upon which they couldn’t deliver. From this moment, Denzel’s second Oscar becomes a question of not “if” but “when”? The possibilities for that “when” branch the timeline off in multiple directions.
Timeline A: Denzel wins big with Antwone Fisher
If Denzel is riding “He got robbed” momentum following the 2002 Oscars, a quick way to remedy that presents itself in December that year, when 20th Century Fox releases Antwone Fisher. The film, a true story about a young man (Derek Luke) who survives childhood sexual abuse, joins the Navy, and confronts his demons with the help of a therapist (Washington), was Denzel’s directorial debut. In our own timeline, the film was admired more than it was loved, and it topped out with a few scattered awards for Luke and a PGA recognition for social justice in filmmaking. But if Hollywood’s got a fire under its collective ass to get Washington an Oscar, it’s easy to see how a more successful awards campaign could emerge.
In this timeline, Antwone Fisher receives five Academy Award nominations, for lead actor Derek Luke, for supporting actress Viola Davis, for the screenplay (written by the real-life Antwone Fisher), for Best Picture, and for Washington in Best Director.
The Oscar race for Best Director is a tough one. Chicago is still steamrolling through awards season, giving Rob Marshall a leg up. The Pianist is still a late-breaking favorite among Academy members. In real life, that sentiment added up to three major wins for its screenplay, star Adrien Brody, and director Roman Polanski, who was not present to accept his Oscar because he was still in exile from the United States for rape charges. In one of the more quietly infamous moments in Oscars history, Polanski’s win was met by a standing ovation (albeit a scattered one) that included Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, and, of course, Harvey Weinstein.
This alternate timeline saves Hollywood from itself, because instead of handing an Oscar to a fugitive sex criminal, the Academy makes Denzel Washington the first Black winner for Best Director in Oscars history (something that … still has yet to happen in real life).
Timeline B: Swinging for the Fences
Okay, so maybe Academy voters don’t get onboard with Antwone Fisher in 2002. A few more years pass, and suddenly Denzel is back on the Oscars map with a crime drama directed by Gladiator’s Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe. Since in this timeline, the Crowe-Washington Oscar robbery lives on in infamy, American Gangster is a hugely anticipated face-off between both men.
In our timeline, American Gangster was a critical and commercial hit that never quite registered with awards voters beyond supporting actress Ruby Dee. But in this alternate timeline, the Denzel-versus-Crowe rematch is being willed into existence from the moment they start filming. The film is nominated for seven Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director for Ridley Scott, Ruby Dee in Supporting Actress, Film Editing, Sound Editing, and a pair of Best Actor nods for Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington. This marks the first time since 1991’s Thelma & Louise (also a Scott film) that two people from the same movie were nominated in a lead acting category. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon split their votes back in 1992, leading to a Jodie Foster win for The Silence of the Lambs. The same happens in 2008, with Washington and Crowe cannibalizing each other’s votes, allowing the already formidable Daniel Day-Lewis to win for There Will Be Blood.
So the search for Denzel Washington’s elusive Best Actor Oscar continues. In 2013, he’s nominated for Flight, an okay movie in which Washington is excellent. Unfortunately, he’s once again up against Day-Lewis, giving yet another iconic transformation as Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln.
Fast-forward to 2016, when Washington is back in actor-director mode with the August Wilson adaptation of Fences. At this point, the “When will Denzel win” sentiment has reached a fever pitch of DiCaprio–in–The Revenant proportions. At the Oscars, it’s a cakewalk as he wallops Casey Affleck’s acclaimed Manchester by the Sea performance and takes to the podium to at last accept his Best Actor trophy.
The gravitational pull of the Denzel narrative draws Academy support for Fences toward his lead performance. Manchester by the Sea is still a very well-liked movie in our real timeline and this one, with the acclaim for that film extended to writer-director Kenneth Lonergan and co-stars Lucas Hedges and Michelle Williams. As it becomes obvious that Denzel is going to best Casey Affleck in Best Actor, voters coalesce around the Supporting Actress campaign for Williams, who has a banger of an Oscar clip scene in that movie, plus is on her fourth nomination without a win. That’s enough momentum for her to eke out a win over Fences’s Viola Davis.
(Meanwhile, that same gravitational pull and anticipation of an historic moment leads Oscar telecast producers to put the Best Actor award right before Best Picture. If you recall, the snafu with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway erroneously naming La La Land as Best Picture was due to them accidentally being handed the duplicate envelope for the previous award, which in our timeline was Emma Stone winning Best Actress for La La Land. In this timeline, Beatty opens his envelope and sees “Fences,” which after a few confused beats, Dunaway announces to a gobsmacked crowd. This ends up getting sorted out onstage, and Moonlight still wins Best Picture, but in this universe, it’s Denzel Washington who corrects the error from the podium and calls Barry Jenkins up to the stage.)
Back to Viola Davis, though, who now doesn’t have an Oscar when she makes 2018’s Widows for Steve McQueen. In our timeline, Widows was bizarrely passed over entirely by the Academy. In this alternate universe, however, the “overdue” story line for Davis takes hold, leading to a Best Actress nomination for her performance as the widow of a master thief trying to pull off one last job. While The Wife’s Glenn Close is still the favorite to win that year for an even more overdue Oscar (with 1988’s Dangerous Liaisons still a commonly cited example of when she should have won), when Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell open the envelope, it’s Davis’s name they read.
This means that Olivia Colman doesn’t win for The Favourite, which is a bummer if only because we lose that incredible acceptance speech in which she makes a fart sound with her mouth and thanks Lady Gaga. Fret not, though! All this means is that when she is nominated in the Best Actress category for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter a few years later — in a chaotic Best Actress category that seemed to fluctuate between Nicole Kidman for Being the Ricardos, Penélope Cruz for Parallel Mothers, and Jessica Chastain for The Eyes of Tammy Faye — Colman comes out on top. Alas, Lady Gaga is absent from the front row that year, but as a trade-off, Colman cheekily acknowledges the Slap.
Timeline C: Are you not entertained?!
Let’s back up again. Maybe the Fences thing doesn’t happen. Academy voters are confused about whether to vote for Washington in Best Actor or Best Director, and he once again misses out. In that case, in all likelihood, he ends up winning the next year for Roman J. Israel, Esq. just to keep the pitchfork-wielding mobs in the press at bay.
But in the unlikely event that none of that happens, and Washington remains without a Best Actor trophy going into 2024, then Gladiator II becomes even more of a showcase for the actor than it already is. In our current timeline, Paramount is campaigning Washington for Best Supporting Actor, a clever strategy that capitalizes on the nature of Washington’s role (he’s the antagonist to Paul Mescal’s leading man) and the advantage that his star power grants him in the lesser acting category.
But in a timeline where Washington is famously the biggest movie star in the world without a Best Actor trophy to his name, there’s no way the studio would even consider running him in Supporting. Just as with Training Day, his villain role would be seen as the co-lead it is. And an irresistible full-circle narrative begins to form. Despite not having a film in contention this year, Russell Crowe — the actor who, in this universe, robbed Denzel of his Training Day Oscar and siphoned votes away from him as a co-star in American Gangster — looms heavily over the decades-later sequel. His Maximus is not only constantly a topic of conversation but a standard that the new film mostly fails to live up to … except when it comes to Washington’s gleefully boisterous performance.
In this alternate timeline, the 2024–25 Academy Awards are a coronation nearly 25 years in the making. On Oscars night, Emma Stone opens the envelope and declares Denzel Washington the Best Actor winner.
But that’s not all!
The three aforementioned timelines each branch off in separate directions of their own, like the MCU multiverse but good. Let’s go back to the 2001–2 Oscars. If Russell Crowe wins for A Beautiful Mind, voters might have felt freer to spread the wealth in the other categories. So instead of Jennifer Connelly winning Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Alicia Nash, the SAG Award winner that year steps to the podium instead: Helen Mirren for Gosford Park.
Mirren winning in 2002 means there’s perhaps less of an impetus for her to win in 2007 for The Queen. That year’s Best Actress race was famously stacked with fellow nominees Judi Dench for Notes on a Scandal, Penélope Cruz for Volver, Kate Winslet for Little Children, and Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada. Any one of those performances was good enough to win. If voters weren’t keen on handing Mirren two Oscars in the span of five years, here’s what could have happened instead.
The Meryl-verse
The Devil Wears Prada, despite only getting nominated in two Oscar categories in 2007 — Actress and Costumes, shamefully bypassing award-worthy work by Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci, and film editor Mark Livolsi (hey, that “Vogue” montage didn’t cut itself) — is a big enough hit and a striking enough transformation for Meryl Streep that she wins her third Oscar for playing Miranda Priestly. With that three-timer’s-club milestone out of the way, her win for Iron Lady doesn’t have to happen, which means Viola Davis gets the trophy for The Help in 2012 instead. It’s more than a little cringey, but it works. Davis having won an Oscar already likely clears the way for Michelle Williams to win for Manchester by the Sea in 2017.
The Winslet-verse
Instead of Mirren or Meryl, let’s say the long-overdue Kate Winslet wins Best Actress for her acclaimed performance in Todd Field’s Little Children. It’s her fourth nomination, and Oscar voters figured it was time. If this happens, then there is no longer a mandate for Winslet to win in the 2008–9 season. This frees up voters to give Meryl Streep her third Oscar for Doubt, at which point this mirror universe doubles back on the previous one where Viola Davis wins for The Help and Michelle Williams wins for Manchester by the Sea.
But that’s not all. If The Reader no longer has the Kate Winslet Oscar engine powering it, the Weinstein Company is no longer able to muscle it into the Best Picture conversation. Instead, that fifth nomination goes to The Dark Knight, a triumph for Christopher Nolan’s marriage of art and superhero movie. With The Dark Knight in the Best Picture race, the Academy is no longer pressured to “fix” its top category, and thus never expands that category from five to ten nominees.
The effects of the Oscars never expanding Best Picture are vast and complex, affecting the entire awards race from the roots on up. It influences what movies get acquired out of festivals and how awards-season budgets are allocated. Who’s to say whether movies like Moonlight and CODA ever get campaigned at all in that world, because they’re seen as too small to ever make a top-five vote?
The Cruz-iverse
Instead of Mirren, Meryl, or Kate, the 2007 Best Actress Oscar could very well have gone to Penélope Cruz, whose acclaimed performance in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver finally allowed the actress to make good on years of hype as the next great foreign import to Hollywood. Cruz winning (and Winslet losing) would mean that when Winslet’s The Reader performance was surprisingly bumped up from the Supporting Actress category to Best Actress in 2009, Cruz’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona performance might not have picked up those Winslet votes, as it did in real life. Instead, Amy Adams, whose performance as a meek nun in Doubt was her second Oscar nomination after Junebug, reaps that windfall and wins her Oscar nice and early in her career.
An Amy Adams Oscar win in 2009 would save us a ton of heartache over the years. It might also have freed Amy from taking parts that seemed good for nothing but chasing an Oscar. So maybe she doesn’t take the role as Lynne Cheney in Vice (enjoy your second Oscar nomination, Amy Ryan!). And maybe she passes on the script for Ron Howard’s adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy. With Adams not onboard, Howard’s production hits a snag, and it’s forced into turnaround. And thus the author and main character of that memoir, an Ohio Senate hopeful named J.D. Vance, doesn’t get the extra boost of name recognition and tacit cultural approval from the film’s 2020 Netflix release, and he isn’t elected senator. And so when it comes time in the summer of 2024 for Donald Trump to select a running mate, Vance isn’t an option. Instead, Trump goes with Marco Rubio or Tim Scott or Lauren Boebert or RFK Jr. or Kyle Rittenhouse or Kid Rock or honestly whoever.
In other words, yes: If Russell Crowe doesn’t win the Academy Award for Best Actor for Gladiator in 2001, we’re staring down the barrel of Vice-President Dana White. So … thanks, Academy? Or not?