The character:	Long John Silver
The actor:	Tim Curry
The movie:	Muppet Treasure Island (1996)

So maybe this isn’t our best use of time, but let’s take a walk together, go through some Muppet movies, and decide which human actors from each movie deserved Oscar nominations for their time. I’ve done a variation of this list before for an older post, but I didn’t connect it to the Academy Awards, so fair play.

1. The Muppet Movie relies so heavily on cameos that I don’t know that the vast majority of the bunch even have enough screentime to warrant the William Hurt in A History of Violence-style nomination for Supporting Actor. Steve Martin and Mel Brooks are the primary geniuses here, but that still leaves us with Charles Durning and Austin Pendleton. Would I sacrifice Justin Henry’s emotive performance in Kramer vs. Kramer for a nod for Durning’s frog leg-vending Colonel Sanders ripoff? Yes. Yes I would. I can’t stand Kramer vs. Kramer. I would be unable to give Durning an Oscar here; actual winner Melvyn Douglas (Being There) and one-sequence wonder Robert Duvall (Apocalypse Now) both have more juice.
2. The Great Muppet Caper owns some of the looniest cameo performances in any Muppet movie. It took me until I was an adult to figure out what the hell Peter Falk was doing. John Cleese and Joan Sanderson are spectacularly straight-faced in their scene. But this is for Diana Rigg and Charles Grodin. I’m not sure I’ve got room for Rigg on my Oscar ballot, but you had better believe I’d find a space for Grodin’s performance, which borders between shameless hamming and something like braindead apathy. He’s great here. I like him more than John Gielgud in Arthur, who won that year, but I’d have a hard time getting him above any of Jack Nicholson in Reds, Ian Holm in Chariots of Fire, or Howard Rollins in Ragtime.
3. The Muppets Take Manhattan features Louis Zorich’s immortal wisdom, that “Peoples is peoples.” Not quite enough there to put him over.
4. I’m going to make some of you a little cranky about this one. I’m not in a huge hurry to replace anyone from the 1992 Best Actor field with Michael Caine in this movie. Among people who had leading roles in ’92, Tim Robbins in The Player is a much bigger snub. Anthony Hopkins in Howards End is a bigger snub. Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, Bruce Willis in Death Becomes Her.

And then there’s Tim Curry in Muppet Treasure Island. Look, you can’t give him Best Supporting Actor over William H. Macy in Fargo, but you can’t tell me that you wouldn’t rather see Curry with a nomination than Ed Norton doing that stupid accent in Primal Fear or noted right-wing lunatic James Woods playing noted right-wing lunatic Byron De La Beckwith. In some sense, what Curry’s doing here is the type of overacting that frequently gets lauded by the Academy, except instead of doing something goofy with drugs or poverty tourism, Curry is playing, deep breath, the most charismatic pirate in American film history.

In his review for My Neighbor Totoro, Roger Ebert praised that film and Winnie the Pooh stories for being children’s movies without villains. Why should children need to see a villain at all? The counterargument here is that if the villain is not terribly dangerous, as Curry’s Long John Silver is not terribly dangerous, then I don’t feel so bad with kids experiencing someone dastardly. Long John wants to dig up buried treasure. He feels like he’s earned it after all of the trials and tribulations he’s gone through, sort of like that horse from The Onion who wants to try cake.

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Long John Silver is bigger than the Muppets like Kermit and Fozzie who would get to dig up the treasure without sacrificing anything for it. Why should they get most of the treasure while he gets so little?

You can see where the guy is coming from. In some sense, maybe he’s not even so bad. Still, we must reckon with the fact that Long John wants what is not his, and he is willing to cheat and steal in order to get that thing which is not really his, perhaps hurt other people to get it. In this sense, Curry is working in the same mold that Charles Grodin was working in fifteen years before. Why are you doing this, Kermit asks Nicky at a pivotal moment. “Why am I doing this?” he says, confused by the question. “I’m a villain, plain and simple.” So too is Long John Silver, a guy who would probably have turned into a villain even if he had ignored his father’s advice and become “a doctor, or perhaps a financier.”

What makes Curry’s Long John Silver so lasting is his development of the most important strand of any Treasure Island story. In the best iterations of this tale, Long John is forced to make a choice between an avuncular, occasionally downright fatherly affection for Jim Hawkins, and his long-cherished goal of recovering Flint’s treasure. He always chooses the latter, but Tim Curry makes that choice especially poignant. Not to be racist against felt people, but this late scene in Muppet Treasure Island where Jim intercepts Long John stealing a rowboat shows the importance of two human beings on screen together. In Muppet Christmas Carol, those climactic sequences where Michael Caine gets happy occur with a backdrop of Muppets. In Muppet Treasure Island, when Long John puts down his pistol and says, “Oh, hell, Jim, I could never harm you,” it just means more than if he had said it to Robin or Scooter or someone like that.