Oscars 2023 nominee Austin Butler is the leading man Hollywood needs
with his performance as the King in “Elvis,” and who’s nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars on Sunday.The kid’s on the brink of the big-big-time, right when the industry needs it badly. For more than a decade, Hollywood has searched in vain for worthy successors to Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio while trade publications have mourned the death of the old-school Leading Man. Our former heartthrobs can still sell tickets (see: “Top Gun: Maverick”), but they are getting long in the tooth and caring less and less about the state of their beards.While plenty of great young actors are on the rise, there’s no cultural consensus around most of them. Timothée Chalamet, 27, is a major talent and has rapidly become a film fixture, but has so far preferred prestige films (“Dune” is as arthouse as science-fiction gets) by filmmakers such as Luca Guadagnino and Wes Anderson, whose work most Americans don’t know or go out of their way to see.Smiley Eddie Redmayne and Andrew Garfield are quirky if good-looking and respectable Brits (Garfield, who has a British accent, is technically British-American) and already, respectively, 41 and 39.