On the surface, you wouldn’t expect a quiet-yet-powerful drama made for a thrifty $6 million to cause widespread fury at the most prestigious ceremony on the Hollywood calendar, but that’s precisely what happened when Anthony Hopkins secured his second Academy Award for Best Actor, thanks to an astonishing performance in The Father.
In any other year, the veteran legend would have been unanimously praised for landing the top acting trophy in the business, but you could feel the air being sucked out of the room when his name was read aloud. Everyone was fully expecting Chadwick Boseman to secure a posthumous win for his incendiary turn in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, so much so that Best Actor was saved until last in a huge change from the usual formula.
Instead, Hopkins took home the gong, and he wasn’t even there in person or virtually, given that the time difference had him tucked up in bed back at his Welsh home. Based on the 98 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and 92 percent user rating, there’s absolutely no denying that The Father is an incredible piece of cinema, one that hinges entirely on Hopkins, but that didn’t stop it from receiving backlash in the wake of the Boseman snub.
Now that the dust has settled, though, Florian Zeller’s moving portrait of a man refusing to accept the help he needs in dealing with dementia has been making a splash on the Netflix charts. As per FlixPatrol, The Father has become a Top 10 hit in both the United Kingdom and Ireland, with the controversy having well and truly subsided.