Oscar's Best Supporting Actress 2017

The five nominees are...



Viola Davis, Fences
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

It better be Michelle Williams or I'm going to break some faces.

It's Viola's to lose.

I've only seen Viola and Michelle so far. Both were great, but I would give it to Williams. Davis will win though and I won't be that disappointed. I'd be surprised if the other 3 are in either of their leagues.

Haven't seen any of the others. Naomie Harris was very good in Moonlight though.

I can't imagine being more impressed with anyone more than I was with Harris in 2016 in this category, but Davis will probably win, and she was great too, so I have no issue with that.

Fixed category this year with Davis going for supporting.

This.

It is a bit perplexing certainly. But she does sort of seem like a side character rather than a true lead, so I can't complain.

Why is it perplexing? I wasn't a fan of the movie but I loved Davis in it.

They mean she should have been in the Lead Category and they think it is a fix putting her in Supporting so she wins. Haven't seen the film so i don't know if that's the case or not.

I think it makes sense she was supporting as the film really didn't revolve around her character.

Unfortunately there are no rules as to what constitutes a lead versus a supporting performance, it is up to however the studio and publicity team advertise it in the trades, and ultimately up to the voters when they get their nominating ballots. There have been winners for the lead categories with very little screentime, while roles that can very easily be argued as leading have wound up in the supporting box.

Viola Davis has less screentime than Denzel, but she is surely the female lead of that movie, and in fact the only female character with any lines (until the very end with the younger daughter). It does feel like a bit of a cheat to throw her into this category instead of having her vying for a Best Actress slot. Though for the record, when the original play of Fences was up for its Tony Awards, Mary Alice (who played the role of Rose in the original production) was nominated and won as Supporting Actress, which the Tony Awards call Featured Actress, while James Earl Jones was nominated and won Best Leading Actor for his portrayal of Troy (Courtney B. Vance who played the son Corey and Frankie Faison who played the brother Gabriel were both nominated as Featured Actors). Regardless of this particular role's Broadway corollary, this is hardly the first time a performance has been shopped to the category where they have a better chance of winning, and unless they make and enforce some rules it surely won't be the last.

Last year in this same category the eventual winner, Alicia Vikander, you can easily argue she is the co-lead in The Danish Girl. But being a relative unknown at that point in her career they figured (and correctly) that she had a chance to get both the nomination and win as Supporting but little chance of being nominated as Best Actress, and even less chance of winning there. Last year much the same was done with Rooney Mara in Carol. She has as much screentime as her co-star Cate Blanchett, if not more, but Cate went in as Best Actress while they decided strategically to better their odds of having them both nominated by classifying Mara as a Supporting role. But it wasn't, really. Back at the 2011 ceremony, Hailee Steinfeld was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for True Grit, but in terms of screentime and import to the story its hard to see her as if not the main character at the very least the co-lead with Rooster Cogburn. But she was young and unknown, so rather than gamble with securing a Best Actress nod they went for the easy layup of throwing her into the Supporting category.

A few of the best known winners in the Best Supporting Actress category really had lead or co-lead roles. Tatum O'Neal is famously the youngest winner of a competitive acting Oscar for Paper Moon, but there's no way she has a supporting role in that flick. She is the lead.

But there are no signs the Academy is going to do anything to stop it. Oh, well.

Only seen 2 of these. Davis over Williams . Probably for many of the reasons talked about. Davis feels like a lead and Williams part is definitely supporting.

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I just loved Williams in Manchester. Can't wait to buy that movie.

Viola. No competition. She was incredible in Fences.

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“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” ~ Rocky Balboa

The two supporting acting categories can sometimes bring surprise winners, but this year it’s pretty damn obvious who is going to win.

English actress Naomie Harris is unrecognizable as the drug-addicted single mother in Moonlight. Naomie is forty and has been working on UK stages and screens since the early 2000s, including 28 Days Later and Tristam Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, but internationally only started to get bigger roles fairly recently. Her highest-profile gig to date is as the reimagined, gun-toting Miss Moneypenny in the most recent Daniel Craig Bond entries, and though you probably wouldn’t recognize her under the wig and makeup she was also the Voodoo priestess Tia Dalma in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean flicks. The first time I really took note of her was in Justin Chadwick’s The First Grader (very good movie), and she is excellent as Winnie Mandela alongside Idris Elba in Chadwick’s Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. You might have seen her in two other 2016 productions: the John le Carré piece Our Kind of Traitor starring Ewan McGregor or Collateral Beauty with Will Smith. But it was the portrayal of the ferocious and desperate mother in Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight that has thrust her into the awards spotlight. She won’t win this year, but it is quite a transformation.

Nicole Kidman has been a star for decades now, and this is her fourth Oscar nom. The other three were all Best Actress nods for Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, and Rabbit Hole, winning for playing novelist Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours. Kidman seems to be a divisive kind of celebrity with some people turned off by her persona or off the screen life, I guess? But I have always loved her on screen. Other than Rabbit Hole, I think most of her best work has gone unrecognized by the Academy: To Die For, Margot at the Wedding, The Others, Dogville, and The Paperboy. She is good in Lion, though it doesn’t rank for me as one of her very best. Playing one half of an Australian couple who adopt two Indian boys, including the film’s main character, it must have had personal resonance for her, having adopted children herself in real life. Lion was a bit of a surprise prominent contender this awards season. She won’t win this time, but no doubt she’ll be back.

Octavia Spencer has been working steadily, though often in very small roles, since the mid-1990s. These were not meaty parts, with names like Nurse #2, Woman in Elevator, Waitress, and Unemployment Clerk. Lots of TV guest work. But she kept plugging away until The Help, which was a hit and also earned her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. That made her bankable overnight. She was thirty-nine then, and ever since she’s gone from working steadily to working non-stop. In 2016 she was part of Sundance entry The Free World, the family comedy The Great Gilly Hopkins, wrapping up The Divergent Series: Allegiant, reprising a small role in Bad Santa 2, lending her voice to Zootopia, and most triumphantly co-starring in Hidden Figures. The true story of female African-American mathematicians at NASA in the early ‘60s is anchored by the three leads. Only Octavia made the Oscar cut, but all three were worthy. She won’t win her second Academy trophy here, but at 46-years-old she will continue this torrid pace, and if she consistently finds her way into these kinds of projects in that mountain of work she's taking, she’ll get several opportunities for more Oscar glory.

Michelle Williams is a great actress, only thirty-six with a long career ahead of her, but has had some hard luck when it comes to her Oscar noms. She was lovely on the hit teen show "Dawson’s Creek", but while her co-star Katie Holmes is who got the most early opportunities at stardom, Williams very deftly chose quality of material over the potential size of her paycheck and has built an impressive resume. Her first movie post-"Dawson" was Tom McCarthy’s The Station Agent which signaled she wasn’t interested in Nicholas Sparks adaptations or raunchy teen comedies, she wanted good material. She worked with Wim Wenders (Land of Plenty), Todd Haynes (I’m Not There), Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York), Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island), Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), and has become Kelly Reichardt’s go-to collaborator (Meek’s Cutoff, Wendy & Lucy, Certain Women). Brokeback Mountain earned her that first Supporting Actress nom, the year Rachel Weisz won for The Constant Gardner. She was magnificent and nominated for Blue Valentine, but lost Best Actress to Natalie Portman’s triumph in Black Swan. She took on an icon in My Week with Marilyn and the Academy nominated her again, but that was the year Streep finally got her third Oscar, for The Iron Lady, after decades of nominations without wins. Michelle Williams’ character doesn’t have a lot of screentime in Manchester by the Sea. Her relationship with Casey Affleck’s character is shown mostly in a few flashbacks. When he sees her in person for the first time in years at his brother’s funeral it is disorienting for him and awkward for her. But the scene she rightly was nominated for is when they have a chance meeting on the street and she tries to say all the unsaid things she has been wrestling with for these years. It is a powerful, heartbreaking scene, and a scene that I am sure is going to be used for scene studies and auditions in drama schools for many years to come. Her performance stays with you long after the movie, even though she may only be on screen for a total of about twenty minutes. In many years it would be the kind of performance that wins the Oscar and a dozen other awards. Unfortunately for her, once again it’s a timing thing.

Viola Davis is a star. This happened late in her career, especially for an actress. Like her The Help co-star and fellow nominee Octavia Spencer, she spent a lot of years working in smaller roles until she finally came to the fore. Her first Oscar nomination was for a small but powerful Supporting role in Doubt (Penélope Cruz won for Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona), and her first Best Actress nod was in The Help (when Streep won for The Iron Lady). Since then she has gotten better and better work in movies and won an Emmy as the star of TV’s "How to Get Away with Murder". As powerful and captivating as Denzel Washington is in Fences, Viola’s Rose is his equal, and she gets to play emotions even he doesn’t. She’ll win on Oscar night, and even the four other nominees will have nothing but joy and respect for her.

Spencer and Kidman already have Oscars and Williams was excellent, but Davis was superb in what was really a lead role, but I suspect she was submitted as supporting to give her a better chance to win and it will probably work.

From today's New York Times...

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Smiling, Even When the Oscar Race Is a Losing Marathon
The New York Times, February 16, 2017
by BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — Smiling and clapping through marathon rubber-chicken awards banquets. Week after week, month after month. Racking up frequent-flier miles (New York to Los Angeles to London to Los Angeles) to woo Oscar voters at question-and-answer sessions. Giving endless command performances to red-carpet reporters who ask the same five (three?) questions on loop. All the hair and makeup. All the gown fittings.

And losing the whole time.

Nicole Kidman, Naomie Harris, Michelle Williams, and Octavia Spencer — each nominated for best supporting actress at the coming Academy Awards — know this drill all too well: It has been their lives (boo-hoo, I know) since November, when their fellow nominee, Viola Davis, started to vacuum up prize after prize for her tour-de-force performance in Fences.

All told, Ms. Davis, who plays a world-weary homemaker in 1950s Pittsburgh, has collected at least twenty-nine trophies in recent months (“Thank you to the Iowa Film Critics Association!”). She walked to bellwether wins at the Golden Globes, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and the Screen Actors Guild. The oddsmakers at GoldDerby.com have her seizing the supporting actress Oscar in a landslide on February 26. It’s the most locked-down category there is: She’s winning.

So why do the other contenders keep going through the motions?

That question pops into my head almost every year around this time, when the gracious losing starts to seem like Oscar-worthy performance art unto itself. Red-carpet reporters do their best to keep the Academy Awards feeling like a contest, but at least one category is perennially no contest at all. In 2015, Julianne Moore won best actress on the September day when Hollywood insiders first saw her in “Still Alice” at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2012, Ms. Spencer similarly breezed to the Oscar lectern, collecting the supporting actress statuette for her portrayal of a maid in The Help, in which she starred with Ms. Davis.

For answers, I spoke to longtime studio executives, publicists, agents and even a few of this year’s also-ran nominees. And some of their responses were surprising.

Joe Quenqua, who runs the entertainment practice at DKC Marketing and Public Relations, cleared up one thing right off the bat: No nominees, no matter what they say, concede they are losing until that golden envelope has been opened. “You can be the longest shot in the history of Oscar nominees,” he said. “You still have to think you have the teeniest, tiniest, half-percentage-point chance of winning walking into that room.”

Mr. Quenqua, who has worked on numerous Oscar campaigns, including one for The Help, said that there are multiple reasons that long-shot contenders cling to hope. Aside from ego — and don’t underestimate that factor in Hollywood — actors and actresses, from their earliest days auditioning, don’t make it very far if they have a defeatist attitude. Upsets from past Oscars can also contribute to magical thinking; nobody thought voters would select Marisa Tomei as best supporting actress in 1993 for her gum-smacking girlfriend in My Cousin Vinny, but they did.

And reporters may play a role. “It’s not like journalists single out the long shots and say, ‘Tell me how it feels to be losing,’” Mr. Quenqua said. “Instead, the question asked to everyone is always, ‘What are you saying in your acceptance speech?’”

Guilty as charged.

Every year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hosts a luncheon a few weeks before its prize ceremony to celebrate all the nominees as a group, from major stars down to the sound mixers. The Academy peppers the room with reporters. Since the event usually falls at a crucial time in the voting process — this year, a few days before ballots went out — nominees tend to be very chatty. One of my first stops was Ms. Harris, who played a crack-addicted mother in Moonlight and is vying for best supporting actress against Ms. Davis.

“Do you plan to write an acceptance speech?” I asked her.

Ms. Harris smiled. “I’m going with Helen Mirren’s advice, which is to always have a speech, even if you know beyond a doubt that you’re not going to win,” she said. I knew I was pushing it, but I said it anyway: “How do you know that?” With a single facial expression, she seemed to toss all twenty-nine of Ms. Davis’s trophies in my direction.

In the end, the affable Ms. Harris offered some insight into how she has approached the Year of Viola Davis, who has never won an Oscar despite two prior nominations (for The Help and for Doubt in 2009), making her the most nominated black actress in academy history. “I’m so grateful for the acknowledgment, which has made a huge difference in my career already, in terms of scripts and projects coming to me — it’s quite extraordinary, actually — but I’m also happy to be able to come to these events and help get Moonlight to a broader audience,” Ms. Harris said. “I feel a responsibility to get out there and do as much legwork as I can to promote the film.”

Perhaps her category mates had similar points of view? Ms. Kidman, nominated for her frizzy-haired adoptive mother in Lion, has certainly done her best, dating back to the September film festivals, to keep that little-film-that-could in the public eye. Ditto Ms. Williams, nominated for her heartbroken mother in Manchester by the Sea.

Before I could track them down, I stumbled across Ms. Spencer, honored for playing a NASA leader in Hidden Figures. She caught my eye partly because she was not aggressively working the voter-filled room. “Can I ask you a question?” I said to her, after identifying myself as a reporter. “No,” she said, sitting down at her lunch table. Now it was my turn to make a face. “Well, you can ask me how my day is going,” she said quickly. “But I’m not doing any press.” Maybe she just wanted to be left alone with her salad? Maybe she was worried that I might drag her into yet another discussion about the #OscarSoWhite controversy?

Or maybe, just then, she had stopped going through the motions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/m...e=sectionfront
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I haven't seen any of the nominated performances yet, but can't help rooting for Naomie Harris a little bit, she's been a favourite of mine since White Teeth and 28 Days Later.