p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text”>

What’s it going to take for Tom Cruise to win an Academy Award?

He’s earned three nominations over his career, as a betrayed Vietnam vet in “Born on the Fourth of July,” a scrambled sports agent in “Jerry Maguire” and a sociopathic seduction guru in “Magnolia” — and won the Golden Globe each time.

Unlike the Hollywood Foreign Press, the academy rarely rewards loose-limbed comedy leads. Still, he might have won an Oscar twice if not for flukes of fate. In 1989, Daniel Day-Lewis also played a wheelchair-bound role and racked up Method actor bonus points by refusing to stand between takes. Then, in 2000, Miramax’s aggressive campaigning and the universal affection for 67-year-old Michael Caine handed the veteran actor his second statuette.

Voters assumed that Cruise, 30 years younger than Caine and the biggest movie star in the world, had decades of success ahead. He’s never been in contention again.

The knock on Cruise’s career is that he plays the same cool-guy character in every film. That’s our cultural impression of him: a man who’s sold more sunglasses, tabloids and movie tickets than any of his peers. His fame overshadows his skill. A pure screen actor — no theater, no TV — Cruise has a knack for creating iconic images, from “Top Gun’s” leather jacket grin and “Risky Business’” underpants dance to “Tropic Thunder’s” bump and grind. He made memes before we knew the word.

Yet the megawatt Cruise in our heads eclipses the nuance of his performances. Picture 1988’s “Cocktail.” You probably see Cruise as a party-hardy bartender flipping rum bottles as the soundtrack croons “Kokomo.” But the role itself is a blend of bitter and sour: a working-class business student frozen out by the corporate cliques who pivots to squeezing the 1% for tips. Likewise, “Risky Business” is really about repression and “Top Gun” about macho bluster. His parts always have more depth than the slickster on the poster. He’s the best actor of his generation still hiding in plain sight.

I didn’t always believe this. Back in 2013, a publisher tapped me to write a book on Cruise’s filmography, detailing how a go-getting actor of limited range willed himself into becoming a global superstar. One early choice Cruise made toppled my assumptions. In 1986, the young New Jersey kid, who’d grown up delivering newspapers to help support his single mom and two sisters, was offered quintuple his “Top Gun” salary if he rushed into “Top Gun 2.”

He refused. Instead, Cruise took supporting roles in “The Color of Money” and “Rain Man” — a pay cut and an ego cut — to work with Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, then Dustin Hoffman and Barry Levinson. Essentially, he chose an internship over a coronation, shunning the superstar shortcut to become a serious actor. And, for what it’s worth, he was such a great foil that both Newman and Hoffman went on to win Oscars themselves for those films.

For the next 20 years, Cruise rarely worked with the same director twice, honing his craft under Oliver Stone, Rob Reiner, Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Pollack, Brian De Palma, Neil Jordan, Paul Thomas Anderson, John Woo, Ron Howard and Michael Mann, double-dipping only for Steven Spielberg, Tony Scott and Cameron Crowe. Not every film was flawless, but few actors have ever had a stronger run of hits. Cruise even tried to tarnish his Teflon persona: “Eyes Wide Shut” turned him into a frigid, fearful cuckold; “War of the Worlds” has him selfishly sprinting away to save his own neck.

I can see why the academy took Cruise’s ambition for granted. But he quit chasing awards in the early aughts, around the time Hollywood’s big night shrank from a celebration of crowd-pleasers like “Forrest Gump,” “Rocky,” “The Godfather” and “Titanic” to what now feels like a wake for movies almost nobody watched. It almost sounds like science fiction now to recall that best picture winner “Rain Man” was also the highest-grossing film of 1988 over the blockbusters “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Die Hard” and “Big.”

Today, the industry is cleaved into two camps: populist hits and prestige indies. The kind of mid-budget delights Cruise specialized are struggling to exist. To Cruise’s credit, other than nearly (and presciently) attaching himself to an “Iron Man” movie back in 1998, he’s shown no interest in squeezing himself into the Marvel Universe, having learned during the filming of Ridley Scott’s “Legend” that there’s little benefit in playing one cog in a sprawling fantasy.

Still, forced to pick between going big or small, Cruise has spent the last 20 years making splashy action flicks. At first, Cruise seemed to need a string of hits that would prove Paramount’s Sumner Redstone wrong, calling him box office poison after that wild and crazy spring where he wooed Katie Holmes, leaped atop Oprah’s couch and hawked Scientology and vitamins as the fix for postpartum depression. (Factually, Redstone was wrong — Cruise’s next two releases, “War of the Worlds” and “Mission: Impossible III” both set personal opening weekend records.) Then after Cruise and Redstone made up, Cruise continued to commit to stunt-filled spectaculars to bolster the theatrical business at large. He put the spotlight on his willingness to hurt himself for the perfect shot. His acting became invisible.

Around this time, I published my book and ended it on a down note:

Now it’s time for Tom Cruise to take another big risk. What he can’t do is continue playing it safe with action heroes and franchises. However, as this book goes to print, Tom Cruise is pursuing the film he once boldly refused: “Top Gun 2.”

My publisher asked if I was sure I wanted the last line to be a bummer. Yes, it was the truth. Still, I was glad that “Top Gun: Maverick” was a hit. Hopefully, Cruise would have the confidence to loop back to taking risks.

Risks like “Digger.” The expensive Alejandro González Iñárritu global-warming satire opened this weekend to polarized reviews and a paltry $8 million box office take.

For Cruise, playing rancid oil billionaire Digger Rockwell was a calculated gamble. His choice of director makes sense. Every one of Iñárritu’s movies has earned Oscar nominations, from 2000’s “Amores Perros” through 2022’s “Bardo,” and his actors nearly always have too.

On paper, “Digger” is a modern-day “Dr. Strangelove,” a burlesque funeral for our planet that invited Cruise to pull a Peter Sellers and get an awards nod for doing multiple roles. The difference is that climate-change comedies have trouble choking out a laugh. We can guiltlessly giggle when a room of yahoos blows up Earth in “Dr. Strangelove” and cross our fingers that worldwide nuclear war may never happen. But the ice caps are melting and we’re all complicit. Every time I dutifully carry around an empty soda can until I find a recycle bin, I’m participating in a farce.

This is “Digger’s” bleakest joke. Iñárritu’s play-within-a-film-within-an-apocalypse structure invites the audience to mock Cruise’s character, only to dismiss that catharsis as cold comfort. Clapbacks, late-night monologues, “Saturday Night Live” skits and yes, even “Digger” itself feel like salvos in the fight for a better tomorrow, but you could also argue that we’re amusing ourselves to death. Still, what’s the alternative? Would it really be any more productive to spend “Digger’s” running time writing letters to our representatives?

I like “Digger” although I’m not shocked that it’s a spectacular failure. But Cruise is spectacular. He’s so fearlessly committed to the film’s Brecht-meets-Beckett absurdism that if Iñárritu asked him to do an entire scene in a trash can, he’d dive right in. Cruise executes a 10-minute, one-take castigation of a stadium of bureaucrats that’s as dangerous as the time he dangled from the Burj Khalifa. I’m sure he believes in the movie’s mission statement that humankind has known that carbon dioxide was raising temperatures since before he was even born, and I’m sure that a chunk of “Digger’s” unconscionable $125 million (or more) budget went to flying him on private jets. After all, he owns three.

The hypocrisy is dazzling. Cruise must be clever enough to spot it, but he charges headlong into “Digger’s” sickening contradictions. For the first time since 2008’s “Tropic Thunder,” Cruise acts the fool. A rambunctious, repulsive and ridiculous showcase of his under-used comic chops, “Digger” is both everything he’s been nominated for — combining scraps of Ron Kovic’s crude fury, Jerry Maguire’s slippery schemes and Frank T.J. Mackey’s toxic allure — and it’s unlike anything he’s ever done.

He should get a nod. He probably won’t. Instead, he’ll probably get blamed for having a Slim Pickens-style blast on the bomb that buried Warner Bros. Setting aside how bizarre it is that we conflate the film’s financial flop as Cruise’s own creative failure — as if every film that loses buckets of cash must be wholly, irredeemably bad — I think his performance is a triumph.

But unless the academy proves me wrong, I’ll end on another down note: After braving the most daring awards stunt of his career, Cruise is now preparing to shoot “Days of Thunder 2.”