Denzel Washington reflects on 'bitter' memory with Kevin Spacey

Denzel Washington looks back at the awkwardly unpleasant reaction of losing the Best Actor Oscar to Kevin Spacey in 2000.

The actor disclosed to Esquire magazine about the moment.

“At the Oscars, they called Kevin Spacey’s name for American Beauty,” he recalled.

“I have a memory of turning around and looking at him, and nobody was standing but the people around him. And everyone else was looking at me. Not that it was this way. Maybe that’s the way I perceived it. Maybe I felt like everybody was looking at me. Because why would everybody be looking at me? Thinking about it now, I don’t think they were.”

Washington was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Rubin Carter in The Hurricane (1999). He competed against: Kevin Spacey (American Beauty), Russell Crowe (The Insider), Richard Farnsworth (The Straight Story), Sean Penn (Sweet and Lowdown).

The Gladiator actor lost to Spacey but he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor the same year.

The actor continued of his reaction, “I’m sure I went home and drank that night. I had to. I don’t want to sound like, ‘Oh, he won my Oscar,’ or anything like that. It wasn’t like that. And you know, there was talk in the town about what was going on over there on that side of the street, and that’s between him and God. I ain’t got nothing to do with that. I pray for him. That’s between him and his maker.”

Nevertheless, the versatile actor won an Oscar Best Supporting Actor for 1990’s Glory, the previous year.

“I went through a time then when [my wife] Pauletta [Washington] would watch all the Oscar movies — I told her, I don’t care about that. Hey: ‘They don’t care about me? I don’t care,'” he told the magazine.

“You vote. You watch them. I ain’t watching that. I gave up. I got bitter. My pity party. So I’ll tell you, for about fifteen years, from 1999 to 2014 when I put the beverage down, I was bitter.”

In 2001, after two years, Washington won the Academy Award for best actor for his role as Alonzo in 2001’s Training Day.