The Santa Barbara Film Festival may have put another brick in Brendan Fraser‘s road to Oscar gold. The actor, who donned extensive prosthetics to play a morbidly obese father in The Whale, took home the annual event’s American Riviera trophy for his role in Darren Aronofsky‘s drama.
Previous winners of the award have gone on to become Oscar nominees — including Kristen Stewart for her Princess Diana film Spencer and Viggo Mortensen for Green Book — as well as Academy Award winners, including Sam Rockwell for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Patricia Arquette for Boyhood.
Aronofsky, the director of the Oscar-winning Black Swan, helped kick-start a full-blown career comeback for The Mummy series Fraser, who received a 6-minute standing ovation for The Whale at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month.
Subsequent to that, he received the Tribute Award for Performance for the film at the Toronto Film Festival. And although Batgirl was shelved, Fraser recently worked with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon, which comes out in 2023.
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