Brad Pitt

How Brad Pitt's zen reinvention has paved the way for Oscar glory

As final votes are cast, the Hollywood heavyweight has been putting in a winning - and carefully calibrated – turn as a wise-cracking sage

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Every awards season has its darling. An actor whose modesty, wit and earnest embrace of the Oscar race charms both punters and peers. Last year, it was Richard E Grant, whose 30-year career – and longstanding friendship with numerous A-listers – was successfully redacted for a new narrative: he was a wide-eyed starlet gasping at the sight of Lady Gaga.

This year’s homecoming king is 56-year-old Brad Pitt: an evergreen A-lister who has managed a third-act reinvention as, simultaneously, a veteran, an unknown (thanks to a strategic decision to wear his name tag at the Oscar nominees’ lunch), a frontrunner, an underdog, a footloose bachelor and half of Hollywood’s best-loved power couple.

Most surprising, perhaps, has been Pitt’s sudden emergence as a public speaker of rare zip and self-awareness. The actor’s acceptance speeches at the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards, where his performance as a zen stuntman in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood won him best supporting actor, made headlines for their well-crafted wisecracks.

In the former, after a nod to Leonardo DiCaprio’s fate in Titanic (“I would have shared the raft”), he explained he’d hoped to bring his mother as his plus-one, “but any woman I stand next to they say I’m dating and it’d just be awkward”. At the SAGs, he began by saying he’d have to update his Tinder profile, teased his director about his foot fetish (“Quentin has separated more women from their shoes than the TSA”), then indulged in superlative self-satire. His part in the film, he said, was “a big stretch: a guy who gets high, takes his shirt off and doesn’t get on with his wife.”

“The idea that Pitt has a speechwriter is not news,” says Anne Thompson, Indiewire’s editor-at-large. “They all use them. Carrie Fisher used to do it. This one is good, whoever they are.”