The first full trailer for Digger dropped Monday, and the internet is understandably fixated on Tom Cruise — potbellied, prosthetic-laden, and drawling his way through Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s apocalyptic satire as washed-up energy tycoon Digger Rockwell. “It took me 40 years to become this character,” Cruise told press. Cue the Oscar campaign.
But look past Cruise in that trailer and you’ll find the thing we want to talk about: John Goodman as the President of the United States — an ailing Commander in Chief who dozes off at the most inopportune moments, and who tasks Rockwell with saving the world from the disaster he unleashed. “Digger here got us into this mess, and Digger’s going to dig us out again,” Goodman’s president declares, and in one line you can hear an entire performance taking shape.
The most inexcusable stat in Hollywood
Here it is, and it never stops being absurd: John Goodman has never been nominated for an Academy Award. Not for the volcanic menace of Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink. Not for Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, one of the most quoted performances in American comedy. Not for his chilling, against-type turn in 10 Cloverfield Lane, which topped critics’ snub lists that year. Not for Argo, not for Inside Llewyn Davis, not for four decades of being the best thing in nearly everything he touches.
Goodman belongs to that strange club of universally beloved actors the Academy simply forgets — a working actor’s working actor, so consistently great that his greatness became invisible.
Why Digger could be the one
The ingredients are all here. Iñárritu is a proven awards machine — Birdman and The Revenant won him back-to-back Best Director Oscars, and his ensembles get nominated. The film, shot by the great Emmanuel Lubezki and arriving October 2 from Warner Bros., is positioned squarely in the heart of awards season. And the role itself — a sleepy, failing president in a Dr. Strangelove-flavored satire about the end of the world — is exactly the kind of showcase supporting-actor campaigns are built on: big, funny, dark, and unmistakably about something.
Comedy performances face a steeper Oscar climb, it’s true. But satire this pointed, from this director, in this cast — Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg — gets taken seriously.
Cruise will get the magazine covers. Fine. But if there’s any justice in this awards season, October 2 marks the beginning of the end of the John Goodman Oscar drought. It’s been long enough.
