How To Go Blind, Lose Your Mind, And Win Oscar Gold

Some people (like me) are disabled in real life. Some people just act that way.

Breaking Your Head In Hollywood

By Judith Hannah Weiss

In 95 years of Oscar nominations, 64 have gone to actors who portrayed disabled characters. Of these, 29 went on to win. These roles are called Oscar bait since actors improve their odds of winning when they act impaired. “Give ’em a limp and an eyepatch!” is a Hollywood trope. You could call that The Affliction Awards.

Think Gary Sinise as a CGI-enhanced double amputee in Forrest Gump (1994). Hillary Swank as a boxer turned quadriplegic in Million Dollar Baby (2004). Dustin Hoffman as a savant on the spectrum in Rain Man (1989), Eddie Redmayne portraying Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything with motor neuron disease (2015) and Sally Hawkins as both an arthritic painter in Maudie (2016) and a mute lab worker in The Shape of Water (2018).

Since 1988, one-third of Oscar’s 30 lead actor winners were portraying a character with a disability.

Of course, there’s disability in real life, and disability in Hollywood. Let’s focus on breaking your head—and breaking your head in Hollywood. In Regarding Henry, one of the first brain-damaged films, Harrison Ford plays a lawyer with greased-back hair who gets shot in the head. This improves him enormously. He stops greasing his hair and quits being a jerk. Geena Davis played a mom with an injured brain who was really great at chopping up veggies, then recalled she was equally good at chopping up people.

According to the National Institute of Health, “50 First Dates maintains a venerable movie tradition of portraying an amnesiac syndrome that bears no relation to any known neurological or psychiatric condition.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC535990/

In Muppets Take Manhattan, Kermit loses his memory, goes to work at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, then laughs at the thought of romance with a pig. In Brain Damage, the movie, a guy named Brian (same letters as brain) meets a malevolent phallic-shaped parasite which devours human brains. This may be the only movie to combine oral sex with eating brains.

In The Lookout, Joseph Gordon-Levitt suffers a TBI that causes him to a) mistake a garlic press for a can opener and b) destroy the kitchen when he finds he can’t open the can. He also calls tomatoes “lemons,” because he has aphasia. In Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a guy who – when he doesn’t have time to take a vacation – gets the “memory” of the vacation implanted in his brain. Then he heads (if you like puns) or rather, attempts to save a colony on Mars.

Then there’s Matt Damon as sequential Jason Bourne(s) in The Bourne Identity (2002) et al. He’s fished from the sea with bullets in his back, a bank code on his butt, and total amnesia as to his identity. Yet he can read, write, shuffle cards and spin-kick creeps off balconies. In the most famous of cinematic head injuries, Dorothy got hit in the head. This made her a nicer person, just like Harrison Ford. Plus, Tin Man acquired a heart, Lion acquired courage, and Scarecrow acquired a brain.

Real disabled people don’t tend to win awards and often can’t get in and out of a bathroom.

Welcome to Brain Trauma, which is where real disabled people are parked. Curriculum covers how to put one word in front of the other, how to put one foot in front of the other, how to keep your head from wobbling and how to get to the bathroom and back. Some are rolling Play Doh balls, like kids do in Pre-School. Some are pounding wooden pegs on a board. I know, because one of these people was me.

Play-Doh balls, like those I used to roll

Nineteen years ago, a drunk driver stole a truck, jumped a curb and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. The good news is I survived. The bad news was brain damage. Although I was “normal” before that day, disability inhabited my childhood. I grew up with Aunt Nennie, who was blind, somewhat deformed, and in a wheelchair. She had polio when she was two, had no strength in her legs, and never learned to walk. My father developed vascular problems, which prevented him from walking or working from the time I turned 4. He lost his life as a physician because he couldn’t navigate medical centers.

Back then, “disabled bathrooms” were bathrooms that were out of order, not bathrooms for disabled people. Disabled people were so off the radar, we didn’t need toilets. Curbs, sidewalks, restaurants, hospitals (yes, hospitals) didn’t work for us. Neither did transportation, seating, sidewalks, housing or doors. It seemed we didn’t eat, drink, go anywhere ever – or require a home.

Covering half of my face after the injuries. No photographs were allowed or kept for a while during that time.