Actor Jared Leto apparently lost the Oscar he won in 2014 for his role in “Dallas Buyer’s Club.”
Speaking with late-night host James Corden on Wednesday, Leto said he somehow misplaced the coveted statuette when he switched homes in Los Angeles, saying it “magically” disappeared.
“I found that it’s been missing for like three years. I didn’t know that — I don’t think anyone wanted to tell me,” Leto said. “But I had moved houses in L.A. and then when we moved, it somehow just magically kind of disappeared.”
Leto has not seen the award “quite some time.”
“It could be somewhere, but everyone’s searched for it high and low,” he said. “I hope it’s in good hands wherever it is, but we haven’t seen it for quite some time.”
Wherever the Oscar may be, Leto believed it was not simply thrown in the trash, adding that it got “scratched” from the number of people he passed it around to.
“I think it’s a good possibility, it’s not something someone accidentally throws in the trash,” Leto responded. “I hope someone is taking care of it. I remember the night I got it, I passed it around to so many people,” he said.
“It was beat up and scratched up, but people had fun taking pictures with it. It’s nice to share it so hopefully someone is taking good care of it,” he added.
Jared Leto won the award for Best Supporting Actor after portraying a transgender person, which has generated considerable criticism over the years. In an article for Time magazine, Steve Friess argued that his Oscar win was equivalent to Hattie McDaniel’s win for “Gone with the Wind.”
“Not long from now — it surely won’t take decades, given the brisk pace of progress on matters of identity and sexuality these days — Leto’s award-winning performance as the sassy, tragic-yet-silly Rayon will belong in the dishonorable pantheon along with McDaniel’s Mammy,” argued Friess. “That is, it’ll be another moment when liberals in Hollywood, both in the industry and in the media, showed how little they understood or empathized with the lives of a minority they imagine they and Leto are honoring.”
“What did the writers of ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ and Leto as her portrayer decide to make Rayon? Why, she’s a sad-sack, clothes-obsessed, constantly flirting transgender drug addict prostitute, of course,” Friess added. “There are no stereotypes about transgender women that Leto’s concoction does not tap. She’s an exaggerated, trivialized version of how men who pretend to be women — as opposed to those who feel at their core they are women — behave. And in a very bleak film, she’s the only figure played consistently for comic relief, like the part when fake-Woodruff points a gun at Rayon’s crotch and suggests he give her the sex change she’s been wanting.”
Leto also famously said in 2016 that Hollywood was too “conservative” an industry to allow for a leading gay man.
“I definitely don’t think a gay leading man would have the same opportunities as a straight leading man,” Leto said. “I don’t know if that’s offensive or not, but that’s my thought right now. It shouldn’t be that way.
“This is still a very conservative business,” he added.
“We’re in an interesting time right now where people are exploring all kinds of different ideas of identity, not just masculinity or femininity … For myself, I have never had a specific idea of masculinity. I think it’s OK just to be yourself and whatever that entails. You know, I’ve certainly never felt required to present myself in a certain way.”