My Award Nominations: Supporting Actress

What a year for actresses in all roles, big or small. Even if you pulled Viola out and put her in an already crowded Best Actress race, you'd still have more than enough options to flesh out Best Supporting Actress. These are the five ladies I settled on, after much deliberation:

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actor

While the ranks of leading men were a bit thin this year (though not really as bad as some are declaring), there were many supporting players to choose from, and that's not even including lead performers who were campaigned in this category. These five true Supporting Actors were tops for me, and on any given day the list could change.

Will the Best Pic Contenders Please Stand Up?

The agonizing wait for Oscar movies to finally show themselves towards year's end is annual gripe of mine. While some years aren't as bad as others, 2016 has thus far proven to be exceptionally back-ended, with nearly every predicted Best Picture contender waiting until the last two months of the year (three months if you include the inevitable January roll-outs) to debut to the public. Only next weekend's limited release of Barry Jenkins' festival darling Moonlight provides us with the faintest hope of a Best Pic nominee that dares to drop before November.

How did it get to be this bad? Looking back over the young expanded Best Picture era, every slate has contained at least two or three films that bowed in October or earlier -- heck, some from the summer and spring -- that would have been absolutely pulverized by the competition had they waited for the winter glut. I fear that fate may be lurking for some of this year's late-breaking gems, whatever they may be. The season's barely underway and already I can tell this is going to be one of my biggest pet peeves.