Oscar Completism: Best & Worst of Supporting Actor

by Baby Clyde

Walter Brennan in "The Westerner". The last of his three wins was the most deserving.

After spending most of my life cataloguing all these Oscar winning performances, I feel uniquely qualified to bore you all with my rankings. We’ll cover my favourite winners before handing out some booby prizes to the all-time worst recipients in each acting category. 

Let’s start with the category that nobody cares about, Best Supporting Actor...

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The Postman Rings Four Times

by Brent Calderwood

The Lana Turner / John Garfield classic The Postman Always Rings Twice opened 75 years ago in US theaters. Based on James M. Cain’s bestselling 1934 novel about a wife who colludes with her lover in an attempt to pull off the perfect murder, Postman had to gloss over the grime to get past the censors, but it remains one of the best-loved film noirs of all time, and its huge box office success has been credited with cementing Turner’s status as a top-billed star. 

While The Film Experience isn't set to celebrate the movies of 1946 until June, Postman belongs to multiple years. Here's a rundown of the four most famous screen adaptations of Cain’s crime novel, listed more or less in order of their critical reputation today...

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Gay Best Friend: Simon (Greg Kinnear) in "As Good As It Gets" (1997)

a series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope   

Turns out, gay best friends can get Oscar nominated too. They just have to get beat up first.

Happy Oscar Hangover Week! Now is a time to rejoice in the winners we love and lick our wounds from the snubs along the way. In honor of the Oscars, we thought we would look back at a nominated example of the “Gay Best Friend.” We don’t often see Gay Best Friends get Oscar nominations or wins. Since this caricature is used more as window dressing and less like a fully developed character, there often isn’t enough meat for an actor to get awards traction. Even if they are a scene stealer, they often will fall short. That is… unless trauma is involved.

Case and point: the 1997 Best Supporting Actor race. Our first entry in the column was about the formative work of Rupert Everett in the hit rom-com My Best Friend’s Wedding. His George still stands as one of the best examples of the “gay best friend,” as he elevated the trope and crafted a fan favorite character. Some pushed for him to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but there was only room for one gay character in the category. Instead, Greg Kinnear showed up in the Oscar lineup for his mincing performance as Simon in As Good As It Gets, a gay artist defined by his trauma. Dear Oscar, is that really as good as it gets for this category?

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3 days til Oscar. Who is the best three time winner?

Best Actress predictions change daily but where are we in regards to Frances McDormand's third Best Actress Oscars? Happening or not? I'm tentatively saying it will. That's where my brain is today at least. Frances would be only the seventh actor to manage three Oscars for acting in the 93 years of Academy history and become only the second woman to win three leading Oscars (after Katharine Hepburn).

The others who've won three acting statues:

Fargo (96), Three Billboards (17), Nomadland (20)

1. Walter Brennan -Come and Get It (36), Kentucky (38), The Westerner (40) - all in supporting
2. Ingrid Bergman -Gaslight (44), Anastasia (56), Murder on the Orient Express (74)
3. Katharine Hepburn - Morning Glory (34), Guess Who... (67), Lion in Winter (68), On Golden Pond (81) - all in leading 
4. Jack Nicholson - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (75), Terms of Endearment (83), As Good As It Gets (97)
5. Meryl Streep - Kramer vs Kramer (79), Sophie's Choice (82), The Iron Lady (11)
6. Daniel Day Lewis - My Left Foot (89), There Will Be Blood (07), Lincoln (12) - all in leading 

COMMENT PARTY QUESTION: Removing all other performances and movies from your brain (I know it's difficult) how would you rank these six packages of performances? 

COMMENT PARTY QUESTION 2: Are there any two-time winners not in the race this year that you could see winning a third?

Horror Actressing: Shelley Duvall in "The Shining"

by Jason Adams

Why isn't the face of "Cabin Fever" that of Shelley Duvall's? Why isn't it her Wendy Torrance huddled behind that bathroom door holding a knife that we see, instead of Jack Nicholson's Jack peering through the broken slats? I mean we all know the answer -- it rhymes with "Fuctural Fisogyny" -- but maybe we should start to do something about that. All of the news stories we've seen over the past few weeks about the victims of domestic abuse being quarantined at home with their abusers feels like a good start to having that conversation. Losing your mind trapped in a single location is scary, but being trapped in one place with a person you love who has lost theirs is scary tenfold.

For all of the abuse that Shelley Duvall suffered as an actress at the hands of her director Stanley Kubrick in the making of The Shining it feels just, and way overdue, to re-situate the film as that of Wendy Torrance's story of survival...

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