In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
Eddie Murphy has been nominated for an Oscar exactly once. In 2007, Murphy was up for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Dreamgirls, and he lost the award to Little Miss Sunshine‘s Alan Arkin. (I think former Number Ones artist Mark Wahlberg, up for The Departed, was the best of that year’s nominees, but nobody listens to me on this stuff.) At the ceremony, Murphy famously left after he lost. Conventional wisdom has it that Murphy torpedoed his own chances by making Norbit, an ostentatiously stupid movie that came out a few weeks before the Oscars.
Eddie Murphy has made a lot of ostentatiously stupid movies, but he should still have more Oscar nominations than that. For much of the ’80s, Murphy was arguably the most bankable and charismatic actor in all of Hollywood; he could turn a middling script into a hit single-handedly. Over the years, Murphy has done a lot of great work, and the Academy Awards wouldn’t have sullied their name if they’d nominated Murphy for 48 Hrs. or Coming To America or Dolemite Is My Name. My favorite argument is that the Oscars should’ve recognized Eddie Murphy for his work in 1996’s The Nutty Professor, a massive blockbuster that absolutely wouldn’t have worked if anyone else had been in the lead.
In The Nutty Professor, a remake of a largely forgotten Jerry Lewis flick from 1963, Eddie Murphy played seven different characters. Murphy had access to the best makeup effects that the mid-’90s had to offer, and he definitely overworked the whole fat-suit thing over the years. But in The Nutty Professor, Murphy deserves credit for finding an easy familial chemistry with himself and using profoundly inorganic means to develop an off-the-cuff improv-comedy energy. He took a ridiculous premise, and he made it work.
Eddie Murphy was actually nominated for a Golden Globe for The Nutty Professor, but the Oscars weren’t biting. 1997 was the year that Geoffrey Rush won for Shine, a movie that I’ve never seen. I don’t know who Murphy would’ve bumped from that year’s list of nominees: Woody Harrelson for The People Vs. Larry Flynt? Billy Bob Thornton for Sling Blade? Ralph Fiennes’ similarly prosthetic-heavy turn in The English Patient? But the world would be slightly more fun if Eddie Murphy had been up for the big award that year. (Eddie Murphy, incidentally, came very close to becoming a Number Ones artist himself. Murphy’s highest-charting single, 1985’s “Party All The Time,” peaked at #2. It’s a 6.)
In any case, Eddie Murphy probably didn’t need the Oscar, since The Nutty Professor returned him to something close to his ’80s box-office peak. After 1992’s Boomerang, the film that gave us Boyz II Men’s “End Of The Road,” Murphy made three straight flops: The Distinguished Gentleman, Beverly Hills Cop III, and Vampire In Brooklyn. The Nutty Professor reversed that slide. The film racked up about $129 million at the domestic box office, making it the #8 movie that year. (It made slightly more than The Birdcage and slightly less than The Rock.) Murphy went back to making flops soon enough — his follow-up was the extremely forgotten action-comedy Metro — but The Nutty Professor reminded the world of why Eddie Murphy got famous in the first place. Its sequel was a different story.
I’ve never seen 2000’s Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, and I’d mostly forgotten that the movie had ever existed. The Klumps cost a lot more than the first Nutty Professor, and it still made money, though not as much. (On the list of 2000 box-office hits, The Klumps sits at #16 — below Traffic, above Big Momma’s House. Popular tastes are wild.) Critics hated The Klumps, and the film promptly disappeared into the memory-hole. Today, The Klumps only really has one…
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