Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.
Last week we played a fun game of Oscar What If… imagining how Roger Spottiswoode’s And the Band Played On might have shifted the supporting actor and actress categories at the 1993 Academy Awards had it been released theatrically. This week we’re jumping ten years ahead and looking at the 2003 Oscar acting races and trying to suss out whether Jane Anderson’s Normal (which we discussed in depth a while back) could have made waves in the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories.
Given that it was released the same year as the towering Angels in America it’s not surprising that Anderson’s Normal (based on her own play) went home empty-handed from all the end of year awards handed out despite featuring two dazzling performances that are usually awards-bait gold: Tom Wilkinson plays Roy Applewood who embarks on a transition to become the person he’s always known herself to be: Ruth; while Lange played his supportive wife, Irma. Indulge me if you will in imagining this Sundance Film Festival-screening title making it to theaters across the country and mounting campaigns that could have jockeyed for nominations the year Lord of the Rings: Return of the King swept the Oscars.
Best Actor
Sean Penn - Mystic River
Jude Law - Cold Mountain
Ben Kingsley - House of Sand and Fog
Bill Murray - Lost in Translation
Johnny Depp - Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Left outside looking in: Golden Globe nominees Russell Crowe (Master and Commander), Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai) in the Drama side, and perhaps even Jack Nicholson (Something’s Gotta Give) from the Comedy category, BAFTA nominee Benicio del Toro (21 Grams), Indie Spirit Award nominees Paul Giamatti (American Splendor) and SAG/Indie Spirit Award nominee Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent). Reminder: the Indie Spirits also nominated Lee Pace for his fearless work in that other made-for-TV trans drama, Showtime’s Soldier’s Girl, which also won him a Breakthrough Award at the Gothams.
A crowded category, don’t you think? Having an eventual Best Picture winner without any correlative acting nominees can sometimes do that, though the Academy’s decision to ignore the great work being done by Elijah Wood in the Lord of the Rings trilogy always surprised me (though it shouldn’t have). Everyone knew Murray would be in the mix (and some hoped he’d win) and once Mystic River took off, we knew Penn would join him (his BAFTA nominated work in 21 Grams surely helped). Depp’s nomination was such a welcome surprise and a wonderful anomaly for AMPAS, which leaves us with Kingsley and Law as the only “vulnerable” men who might have made way for someone else.
Law’s nomination seems the most disposable of the five mostly because it seemed more of an afterglow nomination (and really it pales in comparison to his Ripley performance) attached to a project that Zée aside, seemed to flounder under its own weight. Might Wilkinson, who’d earned his first ever nomination two years prior (for In the Bedroom) have jockeyed successfully for that fifth spot with his nuanced work as a man transitioning?
Let's take a look at the ladies vrying for supporting honors.
Best Supporting Actress
Renée Zellweger - Cold Mountain
Shohreh Aghdashloo - House of Sand and Fog
Marcia Gay Harden - Mystic River
Patricia Clarkson - Pieces of April
Holly Hunter - thirteen
Left outside looking in: Golden Globe nominee Hope Davis (American Splendor) and Maria Bello (The Cooler) — also a SAG nominee — as well as BAFTA nominees Laura Linney (Mystic River), Emma Thompson (Love Actually) (!) and Judy Parfitt (Girl with a Pearl Earring). Add also Indie Spirit Award nominees Sarah Bolger (In America) and Frances McDormand (Laurel Canyon) and you have quite a roster of actresses to which one should also add Christina Ricci (Monster) and Catherine O’Hara (A Mighty Wind) who couldn't turn Best Actress heat and Oscar meta-storylines work for them that year.
This was always going to be Zée’s to lose, as we all know, since she was an unstoppable force both in the film and at the precursors (those previous two Oscar nominations helped lay the ground for her eventual win), but as we discovered at the Smackdown a few years back, not many are pleased with that outcome. Could two-time Oscar winner Lange have crashed this category with her touching portrayal of Irma Applewood, especially as it’d have inadvertently echoed Lange’s first win for Tootsie? It’d have required the Academy to embrace a veteran it hadn’t shown much love towards since her last win in 1995 but in a year where they went with two “new” Oscar faces (Aghdashloo and Clarkson) from films that found little love elsewhere, one can imagine a world in which the “Lange is back” narrative could have knocked either from the lineup — Mystic River’s strength would have helped Gay Harden regardless, while Hunter’s turn would’ve been hard to ignore.
That said, that Lange missed on a SAG nom that year even in the TV side perhaps suggests the subject matter may not have resonated with enough voters in larger groups to help land her the (still elusive) lucky number 7 nomination. That we’ve since lost her to TV means that unless someone writes her a killer role soon, she’ll remain sitty pretty at #11 in Nathaniel’s Oscar Actress Hierarchy (she was #10 when the post was written but Blanchett’s 7th nom leapfrogged her and Winslet may do the same should she win her second Oscar this Sunday).
Next Week: We return to our regularly scheduled programming by looking at Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro, Sr, the personal documentary that the Oscar winning actor made about his late (and gay) father.