One Category at a Time: Best Supporting Actress

With all the major precursors and most regional critics groups lining up behind a single performance, this year's Best Supporting Actress Oscar seems to be pretty open-and-shut. But up to a point this season, that wasn't the case.

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:

SAG Winners

The SAG Awards added their say to the season last night, as I'm sure you saw.
I didn't so much watch the show as listen to it from the discomfort of my bathroom, while an underdone chicken & rice dish from Korean Grill House pulled a U-turn in my digestive tract.

Most of the guild's decisions require little commentary, more or less confirming front-runner status for Mahershala Ali, Viola Davis and Emma Stone.

It wasn't until the final two film categories of the night we got some fat to chew. While I wouldn't have called the wins for Denzel Washington and the cast of Hidden Figures full shockers, they do add enough of a wrinkle to keep things interesting, or at least raise some questions:

SAG Nominees

The Screen Actors Guild is the first industry group out of the gate. As usual, their lists are heavy on Oscar favourites, but the nominating committee is small and random enough to throw in a surprise or two (Welcome to the Oscar race, Emily Blunt and Captain Fantastic?).

Conspicuously missing from their coveted Best Ensemble category is presumed Best Picture frontrunner La La Land. No film has won the Academy's top honour without a SAG Ensemble nod since Braveheart in the SAG Awards' inaugural year. Worth keeping an eye on.

Anyway, here are the nominees their six movie categories:

BEST ENSEMBLE
Captain Fantastic
Fences
Hidden Figures
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight
Captain Fantastic's inclusion hearkens back to the days when we would regularly get left field inclusions (like Bobby and The Station Agent) with no chance at Best Picture recognition. Now the real question: Does this actually sink La La Land's Best Picture aspirations, or it simply seen as a duet as opposed to an ensemble achievement?

Top Five Pet Peeves of the 2015-16 Oscar Season

The Oscar derby has been dead and buried for over a week now, but as usual I still have a few nuggets to get off my chest before calling it a year. Read on, if you dare, and behold my final purge of negativity, after which I can say "Okay, I'm over it" (hopefully).

5. The Big Short's Adapted Screenplay sweep

I know I've been harping on Adam McKay and Charles Randolph's well-meaning housing crisis comedy for months, but I just don't see what made this such a unanimous choice for writing awards. Especially when the competition hasn't been this stacked in years. I mean, good God: Carol, Room, Brooklyn, The Martian, inexplicable snubbee Steve Jobs, and even the long shots from 45 Years to Mr. Holmes write circles around The Big Short's misguided gimmickry, which gets by on sounding a lot smarter than it truly is. The lone bone tossed to Aaron Sorkin by the Golden Globes is going to look very good ten years from now (Heck, it looked good the moment it happened). At least other season sweepers like Inside Out and Son of Saul can be justified on quality, but I'm not drinking the Koolaid on this one.

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actress

It's hard out here for a Supporting Actress. For a true supporting actress, anyway. Worthy would-be contenders like Elizabeth Banks, Julie Walters, Sarah Paulson, Tessa Thompson, Joan Allen and several others had to move aside for the campaign train of wicked uncle Harv, as The Weinstein Co. and Focus Features collectively managed to shoehorn not one, but two leading performances into this year's contest.

And as an extra dash of salt to the proverbial wound, two of the three legit supporting ladies are in here for performances that are a far cry from awards-worthy (Okay, that's subject to taste, but that's why it's an independently owned blog, people!). Lest my pessimism over the category turn too many readers away, why don't we start with the positives:

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actress

Another busy Saturday in awards land. The Annie awards will name their top achievements in animation (are we expecting anything other than Inside Out?), while the DGA may provide us with our strongest clue as to who's really leading this year's opaque Best Director race. If anyone other than Adam McKay wins, will we see a split on Oscar night? If it's George Miller, do we really think he can turn the same trick with AMPAS? Not to jinx it or anything, but that would be the single coolest Oscar win I've ever seen... Too cool to actually happen, I'm sure.

As for me, I'll be taking care of my acting categories this weekend. Let's get the ball rolling with Best Supporting Actress, which hasn't been this competitive in years (and that's without fraudulent leading ladies posing as supporting players).

SAG nominations scattered amongst the pretenders

The first big guild announcement of the season dropped this morning, but when all is said and done, it may not have been such an impactful announcement.

SAG's attention was splintered all over the place, and seems especially out of sync with pundit logic this season. Aggressively campaigned films like Trumbo and The Big Short performed well, but could both conceivably be shut out the Oscars. Some categories could even have as little as an 0/5 overlap with the eventual Oscar slate (especially that Supporting Actor category). For the time being, it keeps any frontrunners a happy mystery. Check out the nominees and my brief knee-jerks after the jump.

Is nomination leader Trumbo really an Oscar threat? Perhaps for Crantson...

Early Oscar Predictions: The Actresses

The annual complaint about Best Actress being a less competitive field than that of their male counterparts is perhaps more believable at this early predictive stage when scoping out potential contenders – It's no less false, it's just that the great, underrated female performances of the year haven't even been seen yet. Still, you don't have to look far to find a whole bunch of leading ladies that show a lot of promise for their upcoming films.

My Award Nominations: Best Supporting Actress

Unlike their male counterparts over in Best Supporting Actor, the five actresses chosen for my own personal ballot had a lot of competition to rise above in order to secure this nomination, and even as I write this they're not that secure. Ask me again tomorrow and I may have three or four new names surfacing as my favourites. That's because there's been a deep well from which to draw this year. So much so, that overlap between me and the Academy has been limited to a single performance (which is obviously going to win that Oscar, so you won't hear me complaining).

Check out my Best Supporting Actress contenders for 2014:

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actress

For casual Oscar viewers, it's all about the acting categories. The chances to glimpse five famous faces squaring off against each other for a minute's worth of acting clips followed by a 45-second acceptance speech are often the only moments of excitement John Doe gets to experience over the course of a 3-hour telecast full of craftspeople he's never heard of and movies he's never seen.

But to those of us who actively follow the awards season in its entirety, the acting categories are usually the most boring of the night, whereby the winners are so firmly established before final ballots are even submitted that it hardly bears discussion.

Such is the case, as ever, in Best Supporting Actress, which has been dominated by one name and one name only since August! But even if the awards narrative feels stale and predictable by this point, at least we can find some satisfaction in the fact that the performance itself is actually quite an atypical Oscar winner, with the more "obvious" Oscar roles relegated to also-ran status.

Let's start with some of those "obvious" roles...

SAG Awards bolster 'Birdman' for Best Picture, but not Best Actor...

Well, if you don't count Best Stunt Ensemble (which went to the solid work in Unbroken where I had guessed The Hobbit), I aced my SAG predictions...

... and I'm not entirely happy about that.

First of all, let's not dwell on the supporting races or on Best Actress. Those categories are all but sealed up with Patricia Arquette, J.K. Simmons, and Julianne Moore all coming out on top in their respective categories.

Let's also not dwell on Birdman's well deserved victory in Best Ensemble. It may not have been my absolute first choice but its cast was excellent and makes a fine winner. If you want to theorize about how "easy" it is for a movie about ACTING to win with the Screen Actors Guild, go ahead, but this is a merited honour for an outstanding collective performance.

What I think we do need to talk about is Best Actor. I had an unsettling feeling that tonight would be the night when frontrunner Michael Keaton would finally be unseated by Eddie Redmayne for his much more awards-typical performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. I don't want to give the impression that I begrudge Redmayne any accolades he receives for his impressive physical transformation, but this is not the outcome I wanted to see.

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actress

Of the four acting categories, this is definitely the one that feels like it's in the most flux. The four televised precursor awards having been split between two actresses; one who has made a fresh splash on the scene with a staggering dramatic performance accompanied by charming speeches on the red carpet and at the award podium, and another coming off a recent Oscar win and reveling in a flashy comedic turn. Let's take a look at them (oh, and the other three) after the cut.

My Award nominations: Supporting Actress

Like it was with the men, work from Supporting Actresses this year was not quite as conspicuously strong as the leading roles, but there were a couple of real standouts in my opinion (and others' opinions too, going by the way awards bodies have been falling in line). Here are my top five:

SAG winners

So the Screen Actors Guild has had their say, and for the most part, they were in lock step with the beat the season has set so far.

All the expected actors followed up on their BFCA wins two days ago, with the only category of some dispute being supporting actress. Lupita Nyongo's win tonight over chief competition Jennifer Lawrence (who won just last year) seems to have effectively settled that question though.

SAG, PGA Preview

The first of the industry's top guilds to announce their winners for 2013 will be the Screen Actors Guild (broadcast live tonight) and the Producers Guild of America (tomorrow).

All eyes are on American Hustle to snatch SAG's coveted Best Ensemble award, but nothing's ever set in stone. Remember just last year that another starry David O. Russell ensemble piece, Silver Linings Playbook, was also pegged to take this category, only to be trumped by eventual Best Picture juggernaut Argo, despite it not winning any individual acting honours. So it is possible that 12 Years a Slave could still pull the same trick it did at the Globes and the Critics Choice; keeping a lower profile all night before popping up in the final envelope.

SAG nominations

The Screen Actors Guild is the first major trade group out of the gate this year, and even though their nominees are always somewhat predictable, there's always a surprise or two to stir the pot.

Nominees and individual commentaries on the film categories after the jump.

Early Oscar predictions - Part 2

My early predictions continue with Best Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, and Adapted Screenplay. Next week I'll start looking at some of the visual craft categories.

Best Supporting Actor

Always hard to get a read on the supporting categories because a lot of contenders stem from large ensembles out of which it's hard to detect the standout without seeing the film. The Monuments Men, for instance, boasts a starry cast, but who (if any) will get the most attention. I'm taking a chance on John Goodman (also starring in Inside Llewyn Davis this year) given his career trajectory of late; featured in the last two Best Picture winners, among several other awards films... how long can it be before his first career nomination? And for which film will it be?

You could make a similar case for Michael Fassbender, who probably came close to his first nomination for Steve McQueen's Shame. He's teaming again with McQueen for Twelve Years a Salve. Perhaps an American period drama is more to the Academy's liking?

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actress

The Supporting Actress slate doesn't seem has chock full of legit contenders as it has in years past. Not that any of these five performances are undeserving of some Oscar love, but four of them really don't hold a candle to the fifth, making this one of the night's slam dunk categories.

SAG solidifies Argo as Best Picture frontrunner

I was going to liveblog tonight's SAG awards, but the local TV station that was supposed to carry it checked out for the first 40 minutes. By the time they corrected their error, I was too embittered to bother blogging, forced to watch an hour of TV categories before getting back around to the movie ones.

Things shook down mostly according to plan. Daniel Day-Lewis, Anne Hathaway, and Jennifer Lawrence strengthened their holds on Best Actor, Actress, and Supporting Actress respectively. Best Supporting Actor was predictably unpredictable, but it ended up going to Tommy Lee Jones, as likely an Oscar bet as any.