Joaquin Phoenix's Best Actor Oscar nod for Joker is compensation for all the previous snubs in his storied career

Joaquin Phoenix seems to have gotten the Leonardo DiCaprio treatment at Oscars 2020, having been nominated for his previous snubs more than the film from last year. Did the Academy really have to give Daniel Day-Lewis a third Oscar, that too for Lincoln, an anodyne biopic practically crafted from the contents of a tin can marked ‘DIY Oscar bait?’ And did they really have to pick Joker, a film that mistakes non-sequiturs for Edgy Writing™, copycat violence for revolution and mental illness for a license-to-kill? A decade in review: Joaquin Phoenix and depictions of mental illness Throughout the 2010s, Phoenix played men occupying various parts of the mental illness spectrum. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, he played Freddie Quell, a ‘shell-shocked’ veteran in the 1950s who falls under the spell of Lancaster Dodd, a charismatic charlatan leading a cult called ‘The Cause.’ There are so many bravura scenes in this film, but two long ones are miniature masterpieces — the scene where Dodd subjects Freddie to a barrage of psychologically disturbing questions, and a later scene between the same men in adjacent lockup cells, where Freddie accuses Dodd of being a fraud. For this writer, a nearly wordless scene in the first 10 minutes of The Master takes the cake as far as Phoenix’s skills are concerned — where beach-side Freddie helps build a sand sculpture of a really busty woman.