The Most Confusing Acting Categories of the Past
Thursday, March 11, 2021 at 2:07PM
eurocheese in 1988, 1998, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Golden Globes, Oscar Trivia, Oscars (00s), Oscars (20), Punditry, SAG

by Eurocheese

NINE women have received mainstream precursor support this year for Best Supporting Actress. Somethings gotta give.

If anyone you know is telling you they know exactly what will happen when the nominees for Supporting Actress are announced on Monday, you should also ask them for a set of winning lottery numbers. You want to know how many actresses have scored the complete quartet of Golden Globe, SAG, Critics Choice and BAFTA nominations in Supporting this season? That would be zero. Maria Bakalova showed up at all four awards for a raunchy comedy, arguably the least Oscary of all genres, but even she landed in lead at the Globes. I honestly have no idea who’s getting in or who’s winning the category… and I love the confusion.

For everyone trying to put together their predictions for nomination morning, let’s look at how some other bizarre precursors shook out, choosing one year to represent each of the four categories. Maybe this will give us a clue as to the current Best Supporting Actress race...

1988 Supporting Actress
This was well before my own awards obsession and before we had tea leaves from SAG and the Critics Choice Awards. Even so, this was a strange year. Sigourney Weaver’s performance in Working Girl took the Golden Globe, and it was the only Globe nomination that repeated at the Oscars; the unlucky others were Sonia Braga in Moon Over Parador, Barbara Hershey in Last Temptation fo Christ, Lena Olin in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Diane Venora for Bird... and all but Braga were in films that did score at least one other Oscar nomination. BAFTA had no crossover, though the next year they played catch up by awarding Michelle Pfeiffer in this category for Dangerous Liaisons (which was 1988 in the US). Geena Davis, Joan Cusack and Frances McDormand all showed up at Oscar without those distinctions, and of course Davis went home with the win. She hadn’t picked up any critics awards before Oscar night either. 

1998 Actor
Both SAG and BAFTA matched Oscar by picking Roberto Benigni for their Best Actor winner, and SAG matched four of the five eventual nominees. So why would this year be confusing? Well, the Globe winners (Jim Carrey for The Truman Show and Oscar darling Michael Caine for Little Voice) received no love on nomination morning, and SAG nominee Fiennes in the eventual Best Picture winner was also absent. Ed Norton made the cut with only a few minor critics prizes to his name. I’d say this is the acting category that typically gives us the fewest surprises, but in this year, it had a few tricks up its sleeve. 

2003 Actress
Yes, Golden Globe winners Charlize Theron and Diane Keaton made it to nomination morning, but none of the other seven Globe Actress nominees did. Scarlett Johansson, who was double nominated at both the Globes and BAFTA (where she won), didn’t land a single nomination. Uma Thurman scored nominations at both award shows as well, and still didn’t make it in. Instead, Keisha Castle-Hughes, whose biggest precursor was a Supporting Actress nomination at SAG, and Samantha Morton, a Critics Choice nominee, took their places. The winning role was not a surprise, but the nominee slate was definitely unexpected. (2012 landed a similar double surprise with its oldest/youngest nominees ever in Emmanuelle Riva and Quvenzhane Wallis.)

 

2015 Supporting Actor
I don’t remember this standing out as an odd category at the time, mostly because the narrative was that Stallone was winning for Creed, but Rylance ended up taking it for Bridge of Spies. Aside from that story, though, do we remember that both the Globes and SAG only matched two of the eventual nominees? Idris Elba (Beasts of No Nation) showed up everywhere except Critics Choice, plus he won the SAG, but still no Oscar nomination. Michael Shannon (99 Homes) had Globe, Critics Choice and SAG nods, but still missed. Jacob Tremblay (Room), Paul Dano (Love & Mercy) and Benicio del Toro (Sicario) all arguably had more traction than eventual nominee Tom Hardy (The Revenant), who only had a Critics Choice notice. Of course, surprise nominations tend to make more sense in retrospect when they come from strong Best Picture contenders (hi there, Marina de Tavira).

Does this season's Supporting Actress confusion put it among these outliers?

I’d say so. You can also argue that the awards sticking to the “expected choices” is less fun anyway. In that spirit, remember how much more wild SAG’s early years were (the 1990s).

Without looking, do you know which of these five actors in each category below (none of whom were Oscar nominated) was not a SAG nominee in their year?

Best Actor:

 

 

Best Actress:

 

 

Best Supporting Actor:

 

 

Best Supporting Actress:

 

 

Which of the acting categories this season do you suspect no one will predict correctly?

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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