2012 Best Supporting Actor Oscar

One of these five will be the Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor. Who do you want it to be, who do you think it will be, who got snubbed, who doesn't belong?



Kenneth Branagh, My Week with Marilyn
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Max von Sydow, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close


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I really would like to see Plummer win for Beginners. Beginners to get an Oscar would be fabulous, one of my favourite films of 2011.

This is a no-brainer. Christopher Plummer.

Plummer is most definitely the odds-on favorite. By far.

Is Jonah Hill's performance really that great?

Hey, stop helping people with their ballots already.

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Christopher Plummer will win this one. Jonah Hill was the surprise of the group though, because one doesn't normally give a comedy actor/actress credit when they're seen in a dramatic film.

And also, where the hell is Andy Serkis for playing Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes? I know it was mo-cap and all, but he provided the voice, the facial expressions, and the movement. If that isn't acting, I don't know what is.

I thought Jonah Hill was surprisingly good as the statistical nerd. However, his character pretty much stayed the same throughout the film. It's good to see him get some attention for a job well done, but oscar worthy?

I'd have loved to have seen Ben Kingsley get some love for his role in Hugo. He was terrific and his character certainly evolved through out the film. Although...would he be considered a lead over the boy who played Hugo? I thought of Ben as a supporting role, but who knows?

Plummer, definitely. He's Captain Von Trapp!

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CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER, Beginners

First things first. What in the fart is Jonah Hill doing here? I'm no Jonah hater. Wouldn't say I'm an apologist, either, but I definitely liked him in Superbad, I went to see The Sitter in the theater and enjoyed it, and to me so far his best work yet is in Cyrus, where his established screen persona had something a little more realistic and dark going on with it. Hill is more than solid in Moneyball, playing a role that is essentially straight. He gets some laughs, but not by doing his usual schtick. Now is it one of the five best performances of the year? Don't see how anyone other than maybe Jonah's mother might argue for that. But it's not like it's total garbage, either. It does look out of place, not because of Hill's body of work, but because it simply isn't all that dynamic or challenging a role.

Obviously he has zero chance of winning.


Ever since that infamous mug shot of the worst hairday every, Nick Nolte has been a bit of a punchline for many. But he's always been an excellent actor, and in spite of whatever the vibe out there might be about him, clearly his peers in the Academy like him and respect his work. Warrior was a small movie based on a true story about brothers who wind up fighting for a mixed martial arts championship. Nolte plays their alcoholic father and trains one of them. If you watch the trailer, honestly he's hardly in it. So nobody much saw this movie, and yet Nolte has been singled out. That's respect. I like the guy a lot on screen, always have. This is his third nomination (Best Actor for Prince of Tides and Affliction) and he doesn't have much of a prayer of actually winning, but this nomination is the industry's way of saying hang in there, big guy (he's seventy-years-old).


Kenneth Branagh has been compared to Laurence Olivier for his entire professional life. Not because they look alike or sound alike, but because Branagh's passion and his bursting onto the international film scene came with his Shakespeare adaptation Henry V (nominated for Best Director and Best Actor). It's one of the pieces Olivier himself brought to the big screen, as is Hamlet, another Oscar-nominated Branagh project. So this tag of being Olivier-like (or Olivier-lite), a classically trained stage actor/writer/director who aims to interpret The Bard for the masses, has been something he's both courted and run away from as long as he's been famous. Well, it comes full circle in My Week with Marilyn, where Kenny actually portrays Larry Olivier (the story of the film is centered around Monroe's trip to London to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Olivier). If Branagh were to win the award, he wouldn't be the first to get an Oscar for portraying an Oscar-winning actor, since Cate Blanchett did this as Katharine Hepburn in Scorsese's The Aviator (and Branagh's co-star, Michelle Williams, will try to replicate the feat herself). But I think it's very unlikely this'll bring home a trophy for Kenneth.


So that leaves the two old timers. Max Von Sydow is a living legend, and at eighty-two has a remarkable career to look back on. Thirteen movies with Ingmar Bergman are what put him on the international stage, but he's played everything from Jesus (The Greatest Story Ever Told) to the Devil (Needful Things), The Exorcist's Father Merrin to Flash Gordon's Ming the Merciless, Three Days of the Condor's wry assassin to the evil beer baron in Bob & Doug's Strange Brew. He only has one other Oscar nomination in that amazing career, and it came in Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror, surely one of his finest performances. Sadly for him, it happened to be the same year as Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. So here he is in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. He's wonderful, of course, even if the movie is cheap and silly. But the one drawback, the element of his performance that may give the other old man the edge, is that Von Sydow's character is a mute. He doesn't have one single line of spoken dialogue. This'll sound like a joke, but it's true: Jean Dujardin has more spoke lines in the Silent movie The Artist than Max Von Sydow does in Extremely Loud. I ***** you not.


As for that other old man, he's another veteran, also eighty-two-years-old, and it's Christopher Plummer. He, too, only has one other previous nomination, just a couple years ago as Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station. Unlike Von Sydow's film, which is nominated for Best Picture, this is the one and only nom that Beginners got. So does that mean Plummer can't win? Not at all. In fact, he's the favorite here. He's also had a great career, from The Sound of Music to The Man Who Would Be King and all the way up to David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Frankly not as impressive a career, in total, as Von Sydow (his work with Bergman alone puts him over the top), but a very respected, well liked man who has been around for a long, long time. If you haven't seen Beginners, you should. Ewan McGregor and Mélanie Laurent have a charming, fun, and sexy courtship, the dog is downright adorable, Mike Mills' script and direction are fresh and quirky, but mostly you should see it because it's very likely the best performance of Christopher Plummer's entire career. He gets to play joy and loss and pain and death and the whole damn thing. It's sweet, it's sincere, it's heartbreaking, it's inspiring, it's subtle, it's real. It's everything you could ever want, especially if you're looking for an Oscar.

Don't bet against Plummer.

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As for the snubs, this is the category that usually has more than a couple, and this year was no exception. Although the humor of two of these disappointed fellas proved very entertaining, indeed.

The biggie would have to be Albert Brooks in Drive. He has one nomination in his career, in James L. Brooks' Broadcast News, and that's it. Cast against type playing the heavy in Drive was rather a brilliant idea, and Albert was terrific doing it. But like the movie itself, its director, and his co-stars, no Oscar nom. That was maybe the biggest surprise omission of the morning. Drive getting many big noms was always kind of a longshot, but Brooks' was considered a near lock. You see how that worked out. Though not quite as expected, another name many thought might be there and one who certainly deserves it is Patton Oswalt, who was just plain great in Young Adult. But no Oscar joy for him, either. As most probably know by now, both Brooks and especially Oswalt took to the Twitterverse to comically wallow in their snubbery.


Those two were probably the tops of a lot of lists, but also not nominated here was former winner and multiple nominee Ben Kingsley in Scorsese's Hugo, which wound up with the most nominations of any film. Didn't have room for one more, apparently, but Sir Ben is rather wonderful (I agree, Aniko). George Clooney and Brad Pitt both got nominations as Best Actor but could very well have ended up here, as well, Clooney in his own The Ides of March and Pitt as the brooding father of The Tree of Life. People complained a lot about Leo DiCaprio's make-up in Eastwood's J. Egar, but all in all it was pretty good. The make-up job that was just plain awful in that flick was for Armie Hammer as Hoover's longtime confidant and, as the film posits, lover Clyde Tolson. J. Edgar got shut out on Oscar morn, and while the attention went to DiCaprio I think Hammer's was the best performance...though more than a bit undone by the old age make-up.

The Artist nabbed a bunch of nominations, but not for either James Cromwell as the loyal chauffeur or for John Goodman as the put-upon Studio head. Hard to cry about that, since it got ten other nominations and is the favorite for Best Picture. John Hawkes was fantastic as the charismatic and frightening backwoods cult leader in Martha Marcy May Marlene, but unlike Winter's Bone he didn't make the cut this time.

One of my personal favorite performances was Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway in Woody's Midnight in Paris, but unlike seemingly most of Allen's films, this one secured no acting nominations. And finally, the always good John C. Reilly was excellent in four films this past year: Roman Polanski's Carnage, the underrated lowkey comedy Cedar Rapids, as the husband in We Need to Talk About Kevin, and my favorite being the off-kilter piece Terri where he played an affable but damaged and confused high school principal.

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I'm pulling for the Canadian.

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Have to go with Mr Plummer

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Christopher Plummer did win the Screen Actors Guild Award tonight, against three of the four same actors he'll be facing off against for the Oscar, the difference being Armie Hammer for J. Edgar was in Max von Sydow's spot at the SAGs. He gave a warm and wonderful speech. This will further fuel Plummer's perception as the favorite, even though the SAG has only correctly predicted the winner in this category ten out of seventeen times. However the last four, Christian Bale in The Fighter, Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, and Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, have been the same. But in the run just before that, only two out of seven matched up.

So as a predictor, not exactly what you would call rock solid, but no still reason to budge Christopher Plummer from the top spot as favorite to win the Oscar.

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I've been a fan of Nolte's since I first watched him as the rebellious son in Richman Poor Man tv series. Just a natural and effortless. He was great In The Prince Of Tides and memorable in Who'll Stop The Rain, Affliction and The Good Thief.
Although not probable, I would love to see him get the nod. That would definitely save him from AA.

Yep, was nice to see Plummer win that.

I think this is the biggest lock of the 4 main acting awards. It will be Plummer.