Tim Blake Nelson as Delmar with un-named actor.

Whether or not there are such things as a “best” actor, actress, or whatever, two things remain true: most everyone in Hollywood wants an Oscar; and, every year someone is left out in the cold. It’s not just that they don’t win or fail to be nominated, but rather they aren’t even brought up or boosted by entertainment journalists in the run-up to awards season. The people most likely to be left out are those that work in either comedy or genre films. This is due to the old myth/prejudice/lie that comedy is easier than drama, and that genre movies (mostly action, sci-fi, fantasy and horror) are lesser than serious old drama.

The Academy must do penance for this ongoing bigotry. To do this, they should give out “Retroactive Oscars”– awards for someone who over time we have come to realize achieved something that was unique, astonishing and overlooked. The winner will be decided in advance (like Lifetime Achievement Awards), but not announced publicly until the ceremony. The recipient will know in advance. Any category can qualify. There would be one per year. These would not nullify the award winner for that year. If, say, Alien would be given a retroactive Best Picture Oscar, it would not nullify Kramer vs. Kramer’s original win.

Initially, this essay was to be a list of people who would qualify for these retro-awards, including Gene Wilder (Best Actor-Young Frankenstein or Willy Wonka), the late Bob Clark (Best Director-A Christmas Story), the editors of Groundhog Day and The Usual Suspects, and the art director of Team America: World Police. I was going to write a paragraph on all of these, but I started with one overlooked actor and just couldn’t stop writing about him. I am talking about Tim Blake Nelson playing the role of Delmar O’Donnell, the escaped convict and redeemed sinner, in the Coen Brothers’ 2000 Americana musical O Brother, Where Art Thou. He just might be the reason they invented the best supporting actor award, and yet when awards season came around, he might as well have been invisible.

Scene for scene, shot for shot, line for line, dumb expression for dumb expression, this is one of the funniest performance ever put on film. Normally, if you are a comic actor looking for the Academy’s attention you have to bulldoze to the front of the scene and crack the joke right open onto the audiences’ obliging heads (see: Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids, Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost). That’s great in its own way, and all three of those examples deserved all the acclaim they got, but Nelson chooses to do the opposite. He’s not swinging for the bleachers, he’s trying to get on base, and when he does so, he allows his costars to score.

O Brother is the story of fast-talker Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) who escapes from a chain gang and works his way across Depression Era Mississippi to, so he claims, retrieve a treasure that might soon be lost. He takes along Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar, the two none-too-bright inmates he’s chained to. In their odyssey they record a hit song, have a run in with the KKK and sway an election, amongst other things. And it’s also kind of a folk musical, kind of.

Nelson is there during every step of the journey (Turturro disappears for a reel having been bewitched by sirens, obviously), and yet there is no scene in the movie that centers around Delmar. He simply plays Sancho to George Clooney’s Don Quixote, Bardolph to his Falstaff, Ralphie Wiggims to his Bart Simpson, offering short punctuation to the lead’s arias. He performs this deceptively difficult role of dim sidekick with abject humility and grace. This is what they mean by “supporting actor.” The audience watches and listens to Clooney’s pyrotechnic falderal, but they laugh at Nelson’s reaction. In fact, it makes it easier to listen to the blowhard Everett when the patient Delmar is listening, too.

Not even during the climactic political rally when Delmar sings “He’s In the Jailhouse Now” does he demand more attention than the scene requires. He nails the song (he is in fact the only actor in the central trio who sings their own part), but he becomes background music for the reconciliation between Everett and his wife Penny (Holly Hunter). Clooney and the Coens cannot be faulted for keeping Nelson on the periphery. Clooney is the lead. Nelson is merely the sidekick. The movie is about U. Everett McGill, not Delmar O’Donnell.

He doesn’t provide this supporting service to Clooney alone, but to the entire cast. When other characters come into a scene, he doesn’t change gears. He stays in his ruminative low-key supporting mode, despite his higher ranking role. Example: gangster George Nelson (Michael Badalucco) picks up our heroes as hitchhikers, and when cops pursue them George briefly stops firing at the cops to instead shoot at some cows which he “hates worse than coppers.” Badalucco’s rabid energy runs the scene, but the laugh comes at Delmar’s sad and quietly empathetic “Oh George…not the livestock.”

He just cares so much. He is not a dumb Southern stereotype, he is a fully rounded comic character. He may not be bright, but you can always see him thinking, trying to make sense of the world around him. The attempts at comprehension usually fail, because he’s way too slow on the draw: as when he listens patiently to John Goodman’s Big Dan Teague rambling about the Lord and life as a salesman, not understanding why Big Dan tears a dead branch off a tree until it is used as a club on poor little smiling Delmar.

In the same scene there’s a beautiful shot (possibly happily accidental) of Delmar sitting in the grass as butterflies play on and around him as if he’s innocent as a rose bush. And he is innocent, his sins having been wiped clean by an impromptu baptism. Everett even notices this saying at one point, “I would like to address your attitude of hopeless negativism–consider the lilies of the goddamn field…or hell, look at Delmar here as your paradigm of hope.” And he is. In a movie (or on a larger scale, the Coens’ whole career) filled with deceit and cynicism, he is a ray of light. As the old song goes, he “keeps on the sunny side” as best as he can. He is the Holy Fool in touch with nature but out of touch with the world. He’s the brain- damaged Buddha. He worries for Everett’s soul. He feels for the cattle, and later when he again encounters George Nelson, cattle-hater, he’s happy that George is happy. He dotes on a toad that he mistakes for a bewitched Pete, and when the toad is murdered via squishing his reaction is as profound and real as Rod Steiger’s (non-Oscar winning) reaction in The Pawnbroker when his son is crushed to death in the railroad car. This reaction is so heartfelt the Coens had to lighten the moment with a hokey old editing trick (an iris wipe straight out of the cartoons) to remind us all that we’re in a light-hearted romp.

I do not believe the role was written this way. I have been a fan of the Coen Brothers for nearly 25 years. They may be the best writers and directors we have, but there is always an emotional distance in their movies amplified by their stylized writing and shooting techniques. In many movies such as O Brother, Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty, they steer masterfully close to making live-action cartoons, so the characters must be broad to fit into the settings. Nelson, understanding this, makes his character separated from reality right down to the Barney Rubble-like curve of his grin, but he does not do this at the expense of his character’s humanity. He grounds himself in both an emotional depth and spiritual warmth that is foreign to a Coen-created comic reality.

The Coens’ world is a cold world. Whether in their live-action cartoons or in their more realistic films like No Country For Old Men and Blood Simple, the characters are hard and distant, or at the least self-centered. The exception is Delmar who is one of the few characters in their movies with whom the audience can have a true emotional connection while also genuinely liking them. Their only creation that comes close to Delmar is Sheriff Marge Gunderson in Fargo, which did earn Frances McDormand an Oscar, thank you. The difference is that Marge is in a realistic film (for you non-Midwesterers, it is realism. They really do talk like that). Her character isn’t as much of a stylistic leap as is Delmar in the magical, musical world of O Brother. Delmar is not of a world of multi-faceted characters, and so there’s no reason to believe that he was written as one himself. He could have been one of the most offensive southern stereotypes ever put to film, a gopher-eating, addle-brained,
white-faced Stepin Fetchit. Instead, Nelson, who in life is said to be one of the smarter actors in Hollywood, makes him a loving, faithful, patient, brave, intuitive, repentant human being. And in doing so, he instills into the viewer not only laughter, but joy.

History is full of adorably stupid characters: Bill Murray’s Carl Spackler in Caddyshack, Bill and Ted, Lou Costello, Bertie Wooster, etc. but other than Stan Laurel-who is Delmar’s spiritual brother-no one else comes close to gaining such sympathy from the audience. The difference is that unlike Laurel, the audience doesn’t realize it’s feeling for Delmar. They think they’re feeling for Everett or for the movie as a whole, not for loyal Delmar. Why? Because Nelson is supporting. He knows his place is to stand upstage right smiling happily on the edge of the spotlight, uncomplainingly holding the movie on his shoulders.

Benicio del Toro did just fine in Traffic. He can keep his Oscar. Still there is time to make amends, Academy. Repent thy error. As Delmar would say, “warsh away all your sins and transmissions.” That’s a hard bit of dialogue for any actor. Give a Retroactive Oscar to the man who could pull it off.