Even Miles Teller Says Tom Cruise Deserved Oscar Nom for Maverick (Duh)

Maverick proved to be a worthy sequel to the film which once made Tom Cruise a big star, and it was also a major box office success, earning $1.5 billion on a budget of about $170 million.

However, despite getting showered with accolades from professional critics, Internet reviewers, and renowned filmmakers, the film got snubbed at the 2023 Oscars, receiving only the Best Sound award.

What's more, Tom Cruise did not even get a nomination for Best Actor, despite giving one of the most impressive performances in his entire career.

That is not to say he was destined to win the award — but not even getting nominated after playing what clearly was one of the year's most memorable roles? That is ridiculous and unfair, many people claim, and one of them is the actor's co-star Miles Teller, who played Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw, the second half of Top Gun: Maverick's main character duo.

In an interview with Associated Press, Teller was quite clear on his position:

'100 Percent [snubbed]. And I'm not saying whoever got nominated didn't deserve to get nominated. But when you think about everything that he's doing in that film [...] the skills that Tom is putting on display in Top Gun and so many of his movies, that's a product of thousands of hours of practice.'

Teller further explained that while some aspects of Cruise's performance in the film seemed easy, especially to an untrained eye, that's only because the actor made them look easy. In reality, they required relentless training and extreme effort on the set.

Sadly, the Academy's failure to discern Tom Cruise's outstanding performance in Top Gun was probably not the reason why he failed to get his well-deserved nomination.

It is actually a long-established tradition that the Oscars ignore action movies, and especially the actors' performances in them — however massively popular and critically acclaimed they might be.

We may also recall that Cruise got his Best Actor/Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations in previous years for his more serious, 'artsier' films — Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia. And it seems that the Academy's tendency to look down on popular action movies has only been getting worse over the years.