Zac Efron Still Has The Biggest, Yakuza-Style Oscar Snub

The 2025 Oscar nominations seem to prove that the last two y🐻ear’s crowdpleasing, all-encompassing shortlists were a bit of a fluke. Amongst the snubs for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Challengers, Denzel Washinꦦgton, and massively outsized recognition of Emiཧlia Pérez, this is a ceremony hard to get excited about.

As a result, you’re left thinking about the misses, not the hits. As well as Challengers and Washington, I’m wondering why Kneecap missed Best Original Song (especially when Emilia Pérez is there, twice), why Denis Villeneuve missed Best Director, why Nicole Kidman’s turn in Babygirl seems to have been forgotten. This year’s Oscars has also got me thinking about the biggest snub from last year, the only major miss of that ceremony, but one I feel is the most egregious of the past five, maybe ten years. And that has got me thinking of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Yakuza (or Like a Dragon).

Efron's Best Actor Snub Will Sting For A Long Time

Zac Efron lifting a belt in The Iron Claw

Last year, the Oscar nominees for Best Actor were Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer, who won), Bradley Cooper (Maestro), Colman Domingo (Rustin), Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers), and Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction). The nominees are no slouches, though Murphy was always going to walk away with the deserved win. However, there is one name missing ꧂from the list: Zac Efron (The Iron Claw).

Efron’s performance in The Iron Claw as a wrestler who used to be a brother, and now he’s not♈ a brother anymore is tragic, touching, and deeply nuanced. It had the sort of depth people frankly didn’t think he had in him, and that sort of thing usually helps potential nominees - just look at the previous winner, Brendan Fraser.

But Efron did not deserve to be there purely on ‘narrative’, as a former Disney star stuck in romcom slop𒀰, on the comeback trail after a facial injury and . Efron deserved it simply because it was one of the best performances of the year.

Best Actor is always a heavyweight category (this year is the same, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:has no clear frontrunner), but Efron tombstones, piledrives, and clotheslines the field that year. Cooper raised eyebrows at the time that have not dropped since, Domಞingo does a great job but is working off a far less rounded script, and (a sentence I wouldn’t have believed a couple of years ago) Efron finds more texture in his performance than Wright. And Giamatti… he can stay. I like Giamatti.

The Iron Claw And Yakuza Are Built On Manly Kindness

Ichiban sitting on the beach in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

What is most impressive about Efron’s role, and why it reminds me of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Like a Dragon, is the masculine tenderness on display. It is a difficult trick to ground your performance in a se♎nse of male glory, of toughness and physical presence, while not only mining for emotional resonance, but framing the performance with kindness. We see other shades o♒f masculinity in the cast, whether it be paired with harshness and distance (the father), or stubbornness, showmanship and self-loathing, or a failure to match its expectations (the three brothers).

Everyone in The Iron Claw is working at the top of their game, which helps raise Efron’s even further. But in being kind, empathetic, and tender, without ceding his masculinity, Efron has by far the most complex role to pull off. And it’s the sort of balance 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:we see Kazuma Kiryu and Ic🗹hiban K𝐆asuga strike across the Like a Dragon series. Though both do it in their own way - Kiryu more stoic, Ichi wearing his heart on his sleeve - they are masculine figures of tenderness. Games so rarely strive for it, and it’s part of what makes Like a Dragon so specia𒆙l.

Awards, ultimately, do not matter. The performance Efron offers in The Iron Claw is still as magnificent and moving as it would have been with a gold statuette in his hand at the end of it. Likewise, the relative snub afforded 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth at (itself the most the series has ever been recognised) 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:does not diminish its power. It’s important not to forget that during award season - how you feel matters more than who wins. But I feel Efron should have been nominated, and this year only reminds me of that injustice. Still, I can look back and know that, like Kiryu and Ichi, The Iron Claw will alwa꧑ys be there.