Movie villains rarely get awarded for their villainy, but without them, movie heroes wouldn't seem nearly so heroic. So it seems to me that great movie actors who make their careers playing lots of great bad guys should get a special Academy Award for their work to make up for the fact that the good guys get lots more plaudits. And so I would like to propose a new award: The Basil Rathbone Award for Screen Villainy.
Basil Rathbone is well-known to modern audiences for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the 1930s-'40s series of films, but before he was Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone was the epitome of silver screen villainy. When I was a little kid, my grandmother told me about how women in the street used to hit Basil Rathbone with their purses and umbrellas over the foul deeds his characters perpetrated on screen (forgetting that he was only acting). And so he's the perfect guy to have a villainy award named after him. And for the first honoree, might I suggest Hugo Weaving: he seems to play plenty of great bad guy characters in films nowadays, from Agent Smith in The Matrix movies to The Red Skull in Captain America. (I'm surprised he wasn't Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies.)
Now, seeing as how Basil Rathbone is proposed for a special Academy Award named after him, I feel, in the spirit of fairness, that a few other actors have awards named after them as well. There ought to be a George Sanders Award for Greatest Screen Cad, a Boris Karloff Award for Greatest Screen Monster, a Lon Chaney Award for Screen Pathos, and a Humphrey Bogart Award for Hardest Boiled Screen Presence.
