The actor, who lends his voice to the new film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, reflected on his career in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, at one point sharing why he thinks the Academy Awards are "nonsense."
"The Oscars are absolute nonsense because everything that's judged in the Oscars, it's not a year's work. It's just the work that comes out between Thanksgiving and Christmas," said Cox, 78.
"I think it makes those awards a fallacy quite honestly because there's a lot of other good work that goes on outside of what they call Oscar season," he added.
While distributors often release their award-hopeful films near the end of the year when voting bodies make their picks for awards, there have been successful outliers with release dates earlier in the year. This past year's Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, was released in July, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, winner of seven major Oscarsin 2023, had a wide April release date.
Cox's comment came when asked about playing Winston Churchill in the 2017 film Churchill, the same year Darkest Hour came out and resulted in a Best Actor Oscar win for Gary Oldman portraying the same historical figure.
"Our film came out in the summer, and it was a relatively independent film, so you haven't got the power of the studios behind it," Cox told THR, later adding, "So my film never even got a look, and I still think my performance is a better performance."
The Succession star is an Emmy and Golden Globe winner, though he has never been nominated for an Oscar.
Elsewhere in the interview, Cox discusses playing the same character as Anthony Hopkins, Hannibal Lecter, in 1986's Manhunter, five years before Hopkins would star in the hit The Silence of the Lambs and win an Oscar.
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"I mean, it's like playing Hamlet: Everybody's going to have their own Hamlet. I chose to play it the way the director Michael Mann and I decided to play it. Tony played it brilliantly," said Cox.
He added, "Tony decided to take it down another route. And, of course, Tony's was a huge success, and he got the Oscar and he made a lot of money out of it. I made something like 10 grand."
The nominations for the upcoming 2025 Oscars will be revealed Jan. 17, and the ceremony is slated for March 2 with host Conan O'Brien.