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Last night’s Oscars might have been superficially modern (K-pop! Female cinematographers winning things! Jokes about YouTube interstitial advertising!), but there was one slightly charming old throwback: Sean Penn wasn’t there to collect his best supporting actor award.
Sure, this sort of thing happens all the time in other awards shows – you can barely get through a single Baftas without an A-lister revealing that they didn’t fancy braving the London winter – but not the Oscars. The Oscars are meant to represent the pinnacle of professional achievement. It’s your one chance to look all of your peers in the eye as one in the knowledge that you are better than the lot of them. Who’d turn down an opportunity that irresistible?
Well, Sean Penn, that’s who. Last night, after he opened the envelope and called out Penn’s name, presenter Kieran Culkin was forced to apologetically carry the statue offstage himself. The reason for this, it transpires, is that Penn may have had a prior commitment in Ukraine. After rumours suggested that the actor may have flown out to an undisclosed part of the country late last week, he was photographed in central Kyiv on Monday “wearing sunglasses and carrying a box of cigarettes”. After that, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy posted a picture of them sitting together in his office.
It’s a hell of a story, one that only serves to burnish Penn’s reputation. The rest of Hollywood can have their little party, yucking it up with Baby Yoda and the KPop Demon Hunters, but Penn has no time for such fripperies. He is involved with important world events, trying to move the needle on an issue bigger than mere entertainment.
This hasn’t happened for a couple of years. The last time a winner skipped the Oscars was in 2024, when Hayao Miyazaki couldn’t make it to pick up his award for The Boy and the Heron. The excuse given then was that Miyazaki was getting on in age, and he didn’t want to put his body under the stress of a round-the-world flight.
But before that, you have to go back a few years to find a star who couldn’t show up. Aside from Woody Allen (who has always habitually skipped the ceremony, citing prior commitments with his jazz band) and Heath Ledger (who died before the ceremony) the last big winner to skip the awards was Roman Polanski, who failed to turn up to collect his best director statuette for The Pianist. The reason for this, of course, is that he’s a fugitive who would have been arrested the moment he set foot in the country.
However, back in the 20th century, missing the Oscars was seen as almost chic. In 1936 writer Dudley Nichols declined his award because the Academy was engaged in a dispute with the Screen Writers’ Guild. In 1938, 1945 and 1982 Alice Brady, Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda missed the Oscars due to sickness or injury. In 1963 Anne Bancroft failed to show up because she had a prior stage commitment and, marvel that she was, chose to honour that instead of messing up everyone’s schedule.
And then there are the wilder excuses. In 1971 George C Scott refused his Oscar on the basis that the ceremony was a “meat parade”, while in 1987 Paul Newman ducked out because he found awards season too exhausting. Marlon Brando famously didn’t attend the Oscars in 1973 in protest at Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans, sending Sacheen Littlefeather to reject the award in his place. And Katharine Hepburn failed to show up for any of her four wins between 1934 and 1982, putting her avoidance down to a simple case of personal preference.
My favourite no-show, though, was in 1967 when Elizabeth Taylor won for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and failed to accept it in person. This is rumoured to be because her husband Richard Burton was also nominated for his role in the film, but was expected to lose. His paranoia about being publicly declared a loser was so great that Taylor apparently stayed at home in solidarity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they divorced each other – twice – within a decade.
So this is the lineage that Penn now finds himself in. By not showing up on Sunday night, he had joined a heady league of staunch refuseniks and nonconformists. It’s actually pretty cool. Maybe this is the start of a new movement, and next year other stars will follow his lead and not attend. Hey, anything that makes the ceremony shorter is OK by me.
