Oscars 2023 nominee Austin Butler is the leading man Hollywood needs
13.03.2023 - 00:33
/ nypost.com
with his performance as the King in “Elvis,” and who’s nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars on Sunday.The kid’s on the brink of the big-big-time, right when the industry needs it badly. For more than a decade, Hollywood has searched in vain for worthy successors to Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio while trade publications have mourned the death of the old-school Leading Man. Our former heartthrobs can still sell tickets (see: “Top Gun: Maverick”), but they are getting long in the tooth and caring less and less about the state of their beards.While plenty of great young actors are on the rise, there’s no cultural consensus around most of them. Timothée Chalamet, 27, is a major talent and has rapidly become a film fixture, but has so far preferred prestige films (“Dune” is as arthouse as science-fiction gets) by filmmakers such as Luca Guadagnino and Wes Anderson, whose work most Americans don’t know or go out of their way to see.Smiley Eddie Redmayne and Andrew Garfield are quirky if good-looking and respectable Brits (Garfield, who has a British accent, is technically British-American) and already, respectively, 41 and 39.
Follow The Post’s Oscars 2023 live coverage Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, 50, and Jason Momoa, 43, are purely action stars.Last year, I predicted singer Harry Styles had a shot at making the leap . .
. and then I saw his two movies.The closest we’ve come to the bygone days of red carpet royalty, I reckon, is Michael B.
Jordan, the villain of “Black Panther” and the star of the “Creed” movies. However, while he is the secret to his films’ successes, it’s mostly the titles that draw in ticket-buyers.What has struck me about Butler, though, is his extremely broad and enthusiastic appeal — and
.