"What a thrill"

Today on Marcia Gay Harden's birthday, couldn't help but flashback to that time we accidentally met her at Pride here in NYC in 2018. Behold the photographic evidence above! TV has been usurping most of her time of late but she does have three movies in post including a Fletch reboot starring Jon Hamm.

Two questions
1. Have you seen Marcia's fab funny work on Uncoupled currently on Netflix? 
2. If you could run into one totally random celebrity on the street, who would it be? 

Smackdown '00: Chocolat, Billy Elliott, Pollock, and Almost Famous

Welcome back to the Supporting Actress Smackdown. Each month we pick an Oscar vintage to explore through the lens of actressing at the edges. This episode goes back to the turn of the millenium, when Almost Famous, Pollock, Billy Elliot, and Chocolat were new in theaters and the following actresses were having a moment...

THE NOMINEES 2000 provided a bevy of possibilities in the supporting actress category but Oscar ignored the gifted comediennes (Parker Posey in Best in Show and  Elaine May in Smalltime Crooks), the foreign divas (Catherine Deneuve in Dancer in the Dark and Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger), indie darlings (Lupe Ontiveros in Chuck & Buck) and even women in Best Picture contenders (Catherine Zeta-Jones in Traffic, Connie Nielsen in Gladiator). What they came up with instead was an almost eerily archetypical shortlist which included five different kinds of traditional Oscar-friendly roles: long-suffering wife, feisty grandmother, manic pixie dream girl, mama bear, and the tough mentor. The mix of actors was also super traditional: Oscar voters invited back two recent previous winners (Judi Dench and Frances McDormand), one returning nominee (Julie Walters), and welcomed to the club one rising character actress (Marcia Gay Harden) and a golden child of Hollywood (Kate Hudson). 

THE PANELISTS Here to talk about their performances and films are (from left to right) actor Nicholas D'Agosto (Trial & Error, Masters of Sex), journalist Kyle Buchanan (New York Times), actress Vella Lovell (Mr Mayor, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), and from The Film Experience, Eric Blume and your host Nathaniel R. Let's begin...

 SUPPORTING ACTRESS SMACKDOWN + PODCAST  
The companion podcast can be downloaded at the bottom of this article or by visiting the iTunes page... 

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Linkness

• Vulture Marcia Gay Harden answers all the questions about her awesome Oscar win for Pollock on its 20th anniversary
• MNPP Josh O'Connor to make a queer horror film with Francis Lee (God's Own Country, Ammonite)
• Deadline very interesting (if way too complimentary) report on dubbing films into other languages. Daniel Brühl is among the top actors who dub their own performances into multiple languages rather than letting other actors do it and change the performance. It helps that he's fluent in multiple languages of course. 

More after the jump including Pose, Regé-Jean Page, Killers of the Moon, a new adaptation of Blindness, and recent showbiz deaths...

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Horror Actressing: Marcia Gay Harden in "The Mist"

by Jason Adams

If you've ever been a big fan of a book that's been turned into a movie then you have probably known the eyebrow-singeing sensation of a book character getting cast by an actor that seems so correct, so perfect for the role, that it astonishes. Think of Alan Rickman playing Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films, or of Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter in the admittedly ill-fated Golden Compass movie -- these actors were already the faces you were picturing when you read the book, and seeing the movie get it right this way, it's always a buzz.

I both did and did not experience this sensation when Frank Darabont hired Marcia Gay Harden to play the character of Christian super-bitch Mrs. Carmody in his 2007 adaptation of my all-time favorite Stephen King story, The Mist.

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The precursors don't always matter

by Cláudio Alves

In these merry times of winter holidays and gift-giving, there's no better present than the gift of hope. For Oscar obsessives, this can come in many forms. One of them can be the reminder that the precursors aren't everything when it comes to the race for Hollywood's most coveted little golden man.

Even if your favorite performance of the year hasn't been getting any sort of awards love, that doesn't mean its Oscar chances are dead and buried. Remember the case of Marcia Gay Harden, a surprise nominee that became a surprise victor when she conquered the Academy Award for Pollock. What a thrill.

She's the patron saint of Oscar surprises. In honor of her, here's a list of those lucky actors who scored an Oscar nomination despite having no nod whatsoever from the Globes, the SAGs, the Critics Choice Awards, or the BAFTAs...

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