12 Actors Who Won Oscars For Completely The Wrong Role
5. Jeff Bridges
Won For... Crazy Heart
Should Have Won For... The Big Lebowski
Crazy Heart feels like another career acknowledgement award win, after Jeff Bridges was nominated four times over an impressive career. His old gunslinger performance in Crazy Heart was good, no doubt, but it wasn't up to the best of his nominations (he should probably have won for Starman). Crueller commenters might even say it was a performance protected by artifice and manipulation (he's as difficult to understand in it as he is in True Grit, rolling his words like sand).
He should have won for his most iconic role - in The Big Lebowski - which still stands as the finest ever Coen Brothers performance and which transforms what could have been an unhinged mess of narrative into the supreme stoner underdog romance. He's hilarious, playing it just straight enough and just outraged enough, and his Dude abides as one of the single most memorable character creations in the history of cinema.