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But Perhaps irony is the biggest test of a child actor's gifts. But look at how Macaulay Culkin disappears into the role of Kevin McAllister in Home Alone while also bringing a self-aware dimension to it. In the film, Culkin is asked to not only play a child but play the embodiment of a universal human fantasy, then show the downside of that fantasy when it's fulfilled. When he and possibly murderous snow-shoveling neighbour Roberts Blossom sit together in a church pew and discuss their shared loneliness, we see a child experiencing the kind of depression about being alone at Christmas almost exclusively reserved for adults.The Academy Awards are determined by the campaigns that are mounted and the narratives that are created by publicists and studio marketing executives as much as by anything else, and children, though capable of acting at its best, usually can't deliver on this part of the Oscar process, whether because of school or family commitments. That's yet another reason why so few child performers are nominated in the competitive categories. But the Academy needs to bring back the Juvenile Award to address these oversights.The Academy has always had a preference for showy performances bordering on the hysterical. Maybe, by contrast, there's a feeling that children can only play themselves. But then how do you account for nine year old Jackie Cooper's famous meltdown in The Champ primal wails and hair pulling when he learns his father has died? And if you feel the opposite is true, that it's hard for children to be understated and not mug for the camera, you need to see The Black Stallion, where 11-year-old Kelly Reno, as a shipwrecked child alone on an island with only an equine companion, delivers a performance so minimalist he could have been a muse for Robert Bresson. Don't think children can be villainous? Take a look at Douglas Silva as the murderous pre teen gangster L'il Ze in City of God. But surely a child can never play anything but a child, right? Then you haven't seen Haley Joel Osment in AI Artificial Intelligence portray a robot who's playing the role of a child for a childless mother. The entire performance is a child actor's detached commentary on the nature of not just childhood but humanity itself.

Time Left - 05:00