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By Christian BlauveltFeatures correspondent

The Oscars abolished its Juvenile Award after 1961, resulting in fewer young performers being recognised. They should bring it back, writes Christian Blauvelt.

A little boy wearing a tux stole the show at last year’s Oscars. In Room, he had given a heartbreaking performance as the child of a young woman who had been kidnapped as a teenager and imprisoned for years in a shed. The little boy’s character had been born into captivity and had never known life outside the confines of this backyard prison. It was a performance that required a tremendous depth of feeling from this juvenile actor, Jacob Tremblay, who was only nine years old when he attended the Oscars ceremony.

His role had required actorly imagination too. Childhood is all about discoveries and firsts, but Tremblay’s character, when finally freed, experiences all of them at once, having thought the shed was the entire world. To have the ability to reflect on what it means to have childhood wonder while still being a child is an extraordinary thing. It requires an empathetic insight into a character that only the finest actors possess.

But Jacob Tremblay was not nominated for his performance in Room, and his role at the Oscars ceremony, though much beloved, was largely ornamental. He gave his co-star Brie Larsen a high-five when her name was read out in the best actress category; he told host Chris Rock, “I loved you in Madagascar!”; he craned his neck to get a better look when the Star Wars droids BB-8, R2-D2 and C-3PO took the stage. He was regarded for his cuteness rather than his talent. And he is exactly why the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences needs to reinstitute the Academy Juvenile Award, with which they honoured performers under the age of 18 from 1935 to 1961.

Oscar nominations for child actors in the current competitive categories are rare. This year, Sunny Pawar, the young performer who plays a child separated from his parents in the film Lion, gives that movie much of its emotional punch. When screenwriter Luke Davies accepted the Bafta Award for best adapted screenplay for Lion, he called Pawar “a discovery for the ages” – and yet, like Tremblay, Pawar was also passed over for a nomination.

Even when children are nominated in the competitive Academy Awards acting categories they rarely win. The youngest best actor nominee was nine-year-old Jackie Cooper for Skippy, while the youngest winner was Adrien Brody, at age 29, for The Pianist. The youngest best actress nominee was nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis for Beasts of the Southern Wild, while the youngest winner was 21-year-old Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God.

The supporting actor category follows the same trend, with eight-year-old Justin Henry being the youngest nominee for his tear-jerking turn in Kramer vs Kramer, while Timothy Hutton, at 20, was the youngest winner, for Ordinary People. The supporting categories give much greater allowance to child performers, however: also nominated for supporting actor were 11-year-old Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense), 11-year-old Brandon De Wilde (Shane), 16-year-old Jack Wild for Oliver! and 17-year-old Sal Mineo for Rebel Without a Cause.

Best supporting actress gave us three exceptions to the rule: 10-year-old Tatum O’Neil, 11-year-old Anna Paquin and 16-year-old Patty Duke all collected Oscar statuettes, with another seven aged 15 or under picking up nominations. The implication is clear: the Academy is more willing to recognise the artistry of child performers in a supporting capacity, suggesting there’s resistance to the idea of children carrying a film entirely. Hollywood needs to come to grips with the idea that age is not a prerequisite for a great performance, and bringing back the Academy Juvenile Award would help reaffirm the idea of child actors as artists.

‘Never work with animals or children’

From 1935 to 1961, this honour, a seven-inch version of the 13.5in (34.29cm) statuette, was presented to child actors such as Deanna Durbin, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Claude Jarman Jr, Bobby Driscoll, Hayley Mills and, of course, Shirley Temple. Many people’s perception of Temple – that she was simply a cute kid playing cute kids at whom adults could smile and say ‘Awwww’ – may have forever tarnished the idea of the ‘child star’. But that’s unfair to Temple, who did much more than dance in wooden clogs or sing The Good Ship Lollipop. Her tap-dance choreography with legendary hoofer Bill Bojangles Robinson in The Little Colonel was Eleanor Powell-calibre. She spent six months learning Mandarin phrases for her role in Stowaway. And as an abductee in Heidi, she’s genuinely moving.

The idea that cuteness is children’s greatest cinematic virtue is one that Hollywood hasn’t really been able to shake. Outside the US, children have been a staple in prestigious films by auteurs like De Sica, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, Oshima, Malle, Buñuel, Bergman and Kiarostami – Jean-Pierre Leaud in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows should be a definitive rebuke of the idea child performers can’t be more than cute. But WC Fields’ famous quote “Never work with animals or children” – the implication being that either they’re not true professionals or will upstage their adult co-stars – has long been a guiding mantra for the industry.

How many great Hollywood auteurs have built their films around striking child performances? From Hitchcock, Hawks, or Huston the idea is almost unthinkable. John Ford is the biggest exception, by building his 1941 best picture winner How Green Was My Valley around 12-year-old Roddy McDowall, whose performance, a masterful study of grief, disproves the idea that child actors can’t go deep. In more recent decades Spielberg went further, building multiple films around children and children’s perspectives on the world. And even Woody Allen, that paragon of adult wit and sophistication, created some of his most memorable moments onscreen via child actors in Annie Hall and Radio Days.

The best of youth

So why did the Academy stop issuing the Juvenile Award in the first place? There are several recurring arguments for the devaluation of child actors’ performances. There’s the idea that children don’t have to overcome the self-consciousness and self-doubt that can be a hurdle for adult actors to overcome the fear of judgment. It’s an argument that suggests anxiety is a key ingredient for a great performance; a child actor experiences none of the fear of criticism an adult faces, therefore there are no stakes.

It’s no coincidence that the last time the Juvenile Award was given was 1961, right at the moment that the Academy’s ranks started to swell with actors committed to Stanislavski, Adler and The Method. For many of these devotees, the challenge of acting is that you have to overcome a fully developed sense of self to inhabit someone else. That means ‘staying in character’ or doing other elaborate acting exercises. How could a child be a Method actor and stay in character after the director calls cut?

Even overlooking how active children’s imaginations are and can therefore be as ‘Method’ as adults, some child actors did have Method-style preparation, if unwillingly. Natalie Wood’s mother would prepare her daughter – without her daughter’s consent – for sad scenes in the refugee drama Tomorrow Is Forever by recalling the time she saw their dog run over by a car, and, on one occasion Wood’s biographer Suzanne Finstad recalls, even took out from a jar a live butterfly and tore off its wings in front of her. Seven-year-old Natalie was pushed back onto the set sobbing, with the cameras ready to roll.

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.

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.

Refusing to acknowledge the greatness of child performers is what’s truly childish.

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