Who is Michael B. Jordan, the Oscar winner for best leading actor?

BarcelonaThe race towards the Oscar It's long enough for the odds on the favorite to fluctuate along the way. But, in recent weeks, the preferences in the best actor category had been split almost exclusively between Michael B. Jordan and Timothée Chalamet, who was nominated for the third time. But the star of Marty Supreme It seems that age is working against him (young actors don't usually receive awards) and it hasn't helped him either. the controversies surrounding her comments on ballet and opera

So Michael B. Jordan's (Santa Ana, California, 1987) triumph in his first Oscar nomination came as no surprise. The 39-year-old actor plays The sinners A pair of twins, Stack and Smoke, who have made their fortune as gangsters in Chicago, return to their native Mississippi to open a nightclub exclusively for the African American community, at a time, in the 1930s, when segregation and racist violence still reigned. Jordan doesn't portray the two brothers as antagonists, but rather as two characters with a fraternal bond of mutual support who, in their nuances, represent two different profiles of the African American as an outlaw. Stack has a more extroverted and jovial personality, and a more morally reprehensible past: he has worked as a pimp, and his main relationship is with a woman who passes as white. Smoke maintains a more sober demeanor, mainly due to a tragic family experience; he is, therefore, the brother who embodies moral legitimacy, and who is destined for the more heroic and cathartic death.

Michael Bakari Jordan grew up in a working-class African American activist family that instilled in him a deep awareness of the civil rights movement and the importance of engaging with a cultural tradition not centered on white role models. The Oscar winner trained as an actor and model from a young age, even appearing as a teenage actor in the first season of the series. The Wireas one of the neighborhood kids trying to make a living dealing drugs, which ends badly. But the turning point in his career comes when he starts working with Ryan Coogler, the director ofThe sinnersJordan stars in his debut work, Fruitvale Station (2013)A drama inspired by true events about the persistence of police violence against the Black population.

From then on, it headlines most of the films directed by Coogler, in a filmography that has expanded the type of protagonists portrayed by African American actors. In Creed (2015), at the same time reboot and spin-off In the Rocky saga, Jordan plays the son of the legendary Apollo Creed, Rocky Balboa's former antagonist and later colleague. But here, the young African-American boxer is no longer a rival or supporting character; instead, he takes over as the protagonist from the former white fighter. This symbolic shift extends to the next joint project of the Coogler-Jordan duo, Black Panther (2018), Marvel's first major Afrocentric blockbuster, in which the now Oscar-winning actor plays the villain, a role that, nevertheless, cements his status as Marvel's biggest Black star, a universe he had already entered as the Human Torch in The Fantastic Four of 2015. Jordan thus confirms himself as a type of star that was previously unusual: the African-American actor who triumphs in a territory, that of blockbuster action films, until now almost exclusively the domain of white actors in leading roles.

A The sinnersCoogler and Jordan have sought to concentrate the themes explored in their collaborative filmography: the actor plays two roles that combine the charisma and physical prowess of action movie icons with the dramatic weight of a film that functions as an allegory for the struggles of African Americans to overcome adversity, through characters marked by their past and the historical context in which they live. Perhaps Jordan's performance wasn't the strongest among the five nominees because he doesn't always manage to delve deeply into all these aspects. It's not even the most remarkable of them all.The sinnersBut it does mark a historic milestone in certifying a step forward in the role of the African American star in Hollywood cinema.