There are so many things to talk about surrounding the 2026 Oscars, I have a lot of opinions and I, unlike Ryan Coogler apparently, love to be a critic. But here, we will be focusing on one question and one answer from one interview. 

Amelia Dimoldenberg: 
“Do you have any advice for someone who also has a bit of an unrequited love theme in their life?”
Ethan Hawke: 
“The one who’s in love always wins… when you’re feeling, you’re alive. The sun doesn’t care whether the grass appreciates its rays…”

Ethan Hawke recently starred in the film Blue Moon, a biopic of lyricist Lorenz Hart, and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor. Lorenz Hart is portrayed as a sad lonely man who is nothing short of obsessed with a woman, Elizabeth Weiland. He talks about her as if his romantic feelings for her are mutual, but we come to learn that she simply admires his talents and thinks of him as a friend. Hawke is phenomenal in the role, he brings a version of unrequited love alive in a way that would make any person with their own experience with unrequited love take pause and look internally. And as a person who could maybe be considered a professional in this field, believe me when I say this, it was not a pleasant internal investigation. 

Unrequited love, by definition “is a love which is not reciprocated, one-sided or more generally unequal, resulting in a yearning for more complete love”. With no statistics to back this up, I think most people have experienced some version of this love. Sometimes these feelings can be experienced within an already established romantic relationship, an unequal balance of feelings and emotions. Sometimes it can be experienced for a friend who simply never reciprocates the feelings. Sometimes the feelings can be experienced for a person already romantically engaged and unavailable. 

I have a theory that the majority of the unrequited love that exists is avoidable, or at least limitable. I’ve read through many articles and threads, heard many experiences and had multiple of my own – unrequited love is painful and often considered more painful than a breakup. In my experience, this is absolutely true. A breakup, while painful, has answers, it has a beginning, middle, and end, it has reason. Unrequited love is full of “what if’s”, there is no sense to it, and there is no end. This is my experience and the general consensus of how it feels to walk in the world of unrequited love. While comparing a breakup and unrequited love is like comparing apples and oranges, the reasoning behind it is simple; to point out the communication in one, and the lack of communication in the other. I think so often when it comes to the feelings of unrequited love we end up in these long term loops because of a choice to not communicate or because of poor communication. However, I also think that’s an extremely simplified way of looking at an extremely complicated feeling. So while I do believe communication is the key in situations where romantic feelings exist, I also know that that is much easier said than done.

I can’t speak for every person or every situation, but I do know my own multiple long lasting and intense experiences with unrequited love. While watching Blue Moon I did not see myself in Hart at all, but looking back and considering the…delusion aspect, there are maybe, kinda some similarities. Honestly, I think anybody who knows this type of love can probably see themselves in this character, even if you don’t want to admit it, and even if only slightly or in part. I think such a big part of these feelings, for me at least, is the intense feeling of knowing. And, unfortunately, there comes a point where you can no longer trust your intuition because it is telling you things that do not seem to be coming true but your gut insists are true – this for me is the absolute killer. Hart was deep down this rabbit hole in Blue Moon, and for him, having a blunt conversation about each of their feelings was the only way he was ever going to come out of the rabbit hole. In my experience, sharing how I felt was the only way to temper the feelings at all. It wasn’t fun, so much so that I wouldn’t do it again (hence the aforementioned easier said than done), but it at least took away some of the “what if’s”. 

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how much unrequited love you’ve experienced, humans are social animals. We require human interaction, community, friends, relationships. But the way we interact, our ability and willingness to share ourselves, is determined in some measure by our socialization. We aren’t all raised in the same situations, same cities, or same cultures. We aren’t always going to know how to show and share our love. And unrequited love might be thought of in a negative way, framed on the person as if they’re unlovable, especially if they have a pattern of these feelings in their life. But I think Ethan Hawke has it right, “The one who’s in love always wins”. To continue loving, and being willing to share yourself when you don’t know if that love will ever be reciprocated, that’s the joy of life, that’s what it is to be human.