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Presenter Jennifer Connelly might have been thrilled that The Whale took home the 2023 Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, but film fans, critics, and journalists on Twitter are fuming. Almost as soon as Oscar-winners Adrien Morot, Judy Chin, and Anne Marie Bradley made it to the stage, folks took to Twitter to complain about the award going to a “fat suit team.”
Oscar-winning film The Whale stars Best Actor nominee Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a morbidly obese English professor on the verge of death. Fraser has been unanimously feted for his performance as Charlie, but the film itself has had something of a controversial run leading up to the 95th Academy Awards. While some critics adored director Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play, others felt it glorified fat-shaming and dehumanized its main character.
The Whale‘s makeup team was up against artists from The Batman, All Quiet On the Western Front, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Elvis. After The Whale‘s Adrien Morot, Judy Chin, and Anne Marie Bradley won the Oscar for their work transforming Brendan Fraser into Charlie, writers and personalities including Roxane Gay vented their frustration on Twitter. Editor-in-chief of SELF magazine Rachel Wilkerson Miller mused, “It’s bad enough that we’re still putting actors in fatsuits but now we’re also giving Best Makeup Oscars to the fatsuit making guy???” and former Variety critic Caroline Framke tweeted, “When did Best Makeup/Hairstyling become Most Fatsuit”
The Whale star Brendan Fraser would go on to edge out Elvis‘s Austin Butler, The Banshees of Inisherin‘s Colin Farrell, Aftersun‘s Paul Mescal, and Living‘s Bill Nighy for the Best Actor Oscar. While Fraser’s performance didn’t inspire the same ire as the makeup team’s win, he did make multiple references to whales in his acceptance speech. He praised his fellow nominees for their “whale-sized hearts” and said that “only whales can swim at the depth of the talent of Hong Chau.”
