Chadwick Boseman's brother says family's OK with Anthony Hopkins' Oscar win
Chadwick Boseman's final performance in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" earned the late movie star posthumous Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards. Widely favored to win this year's Oscar for best actor, Boseman lost to Anthony Hopkins in his role in "The Father." Credit: Getty Images for dcp / Matt Winkelmeyer
Derrick Boseman, brother of the late Chadwick Boseman, says that despite Sunday night's Oscars upset in which his front-runner sibling lost the best-actor award to Anthony Hopkins, the Boseman family bears no one ill will.
Telling TMZ.com on Monday that he did not consider his brother's loss of a posthumous Academy Award a snub, Derrick Boseman, 55, said he and the Boseman family wished venerable actor Hopkins well. "I'm sure [ Hopkins] would if Chad won," he told the celebrity news website.
Britain's Hopkins, 83, whose Oscar for his role as a combative senior sliding into dementia in "The Father" made him the oldest person to receive an Academy Award, had saluted Chadwick Boseman in an Instagram video the day after the ceremony. "I did not expect to get this award. I really didn't," Hopkins, who was in his native Wales and did not attend the ceremony either live or remotely, said in part, adding, "I want to pay tribute to Chadwick Boseman, who was taken from us far too early."
The youngest of three brothers, Boseman died Aug. 28 at age 43 following a long and largely secret battle with colon cancer. Middle brother Kevin Boseman, a former Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey dancer in his late 40s, wrote on Instagram on April 12 that he, himself, was in remission from cancer.
Derrick Boseman, a pastor in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, added that Chadwick was never fixated on winning an Academy Award, and had "always described them to me as a campaign."
After receiving posthumous Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards, among others, for playing ambitious trumpeter Levee in Netflix's film adaptation of August Wilson's Broadway play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," Chadwick Boseman had been widely expected to also win the Academy Award.
In seeming anticipation of a Boseman win, the ceremony's producers had moved best actress and best actor to the final two announced awards of the evening, moving the traditional closer, best picture, ahead of them.
Hopkins' surprise win — his second, following best actor for "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991), and his sixth nomination — caused online outrage among fans of Boseman, who in addition to his final movie had turned in critically acclaimed performances in films including "Black Panther" (2018), "Marshall" (2017) and "42" (2013).
