So Michael Keaton, why didn’t you win the Best Actor Oscar?
And so to sunny Salt Lake City and the Adobe Summit, where star of Batman, Beetlejuice and Birdman (although not a B-lister) Michael Keaton was on bombastic form, talking life, films, and vaguley hinting he felt there was a coming class war.
He was being interviewed on stage in front of 6,500 people by Anne Lewnes, Adobe’s chief marketing officer and closest approximation to Leigh Sales – who wasted no time in going for the jugular by asking him: “Why didn’t you win the Best Actor Oscar?”
It didn’t take long for the memes to take off:
RT @jontherose: #AdobeSummit @MichaelKeaton That face. pic.twitter.com/kxiXIjA5XE
— elisabeth osmeloski (@elisabethos) March 11, 2015
In fairness to Keaton he tackled the question at length – five minutes to be precise.
He revealed Robert Downey Junior had told him it’s not a competition, to which he said “I remember thinking ‘fuck no we are competing'”, and then suggesting a better way to decide it than to let Academy members vote would be a fight, “or a one on one race, or basketball, or anything I can control – and cheat at to win”.
He then admitted he realised he wasn’t going to win at the nomination event, when he spoke to a lifelong member of the Academy who praised his role in Birdman as one of the greatest he’s ever seen, before saying to him “unfortunately, illness always wins”.
“It was at that point I thought, I’m fucked. As fucked as fucked can be,” said Keaton, leaving the surprisingly prudish audience shocked at his swearing on stage.
And so it came to pass he lost to Eddy Redmayne who played Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.
When Lewnes asked him whether he should have won he replied simply “yes”.
Then as modestly he added: “I don’t think people appreciated the degree of difficulty to make what we did.”
He also talked about social media, admitting he didn’t see the value in having millions of followers (he has 200,000) on Twitter saying “that I don’t get, I find it an extraordinary waste of time,” and admitting he preferred Instagram as a platform.
Further on the subject of awards he added: “The tricky thing about awards and things is I never wanted to be at the whim of other people, I wanted to be the Whimster.”
