Last year, we introduced the Golden Year Award to honor the one person who absolutely owned the year, whether it was on TV, in movies, or behind the scenes, and Rotten Tomatoes fans crowned Keanu Reeves the winner. This year, while the voting on Fan Favorite Actor and Fan Favorite Actress did spill over into here a bit, the winner was the late Chadwick Boseman.
We all mourned when we learned that Boseman had succumbed to the colon cancer he had been fighting since 2016 — something that no one but those closest to him were aware of. His career is marked by powerful performances in films about some of the most influential Black figures in American history, from Jackie Robinson to Thurgood Marshall, and his portrayal of T’Challa in Marvel’s Black Panther endeared him to comic book fans everywhere. So it’s fitting that Boseman’s final performances would come in Da 5 Bloods, a timely Spike Lee joint that dropped just as the world was reacting to the death of George Floyd, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the August Wilson adaptation that would earn him a posthumous Best Actor Academy Award nomination. We would be hard pressed to argue against this choice.
The order below reflects the number of total votes cast for each person by users in a poll that ran on RT from March 10 to April 13.
Chadwick Boseman
Kind of difficult to argue against this one, right? The man was an icon for a younger generation, and if his bright future was ever in doubt, one need only to look at his final two powerful performances in Da 5 Blood and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the latter of which is likely to win him a posthumous Oscar for Best Actor.
