Readers' Ranking: Streep's Oscar Noms, #16-11

Last month we asked readers to rank all of Meryl Streep's Oscar nominated performances...

There were 16 of them when the polling began since The Iron Lady was still unseen by many and too fresh for retrospective rank as well. Here are the results in ascending order.

I've included comments on and from the ballots for extra flavor. You'll also find details and guesstimates about that year's Oscar voting though I'm sure you'll "correct" me if you have different ideas about how it all went down, won't you?

16. Music of the Heart (1999) 
Role & Balloting: Streep's true story arts-friendly role about a violin teacher (yes, she learned the difficult instrument) is widely seen as her most obvious "default" nomination and though not everyone agrees with its low place in the Streep canon, it ended up in last place with Film Experience readers on 30% of the ballots. Quite a feat when you consider that it was also one of the least seen, absent from another 30% of the ballots. Yikes.

Who Won the Oscar: Hilary Swank, Boys Don't Cry
Other Nominees in Guesstimate Order of AMPAS Love: Annette Bening (American Beauty), Janet McTeer (Tumbleweeds) and Julianne Moore (The End of the Affair) and Meryl (Music of the Heart)
The Dread Sixth Place Finish?:  T'was obviously Reese Witherspoon in Election, damnit. Oscar should've picked Flick!

15. Ironweed (1987)
Role & Balloting: Her performance as a severe alcoholic former singer "Helen Archer" was greeted in the 80s as one of her strongest "technical" performances since she's virtually unrecognizable. Nowadways it's the least seen Streep nominated role and one of the most divisive considering where it ranked on ballots that had seen it (all over the place). Ironweed got some attention recently when Anne Hathaway resurrected Streep's "He's Me Pal" for the Kennedy Center Honors.

Who Won the Oscar: Cher, Moonstruck
Nominees in Guesstimate Order of AMPAS Love: Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction), Holly Hunter (Broadcast News), Sally Kirkland (Anna) and Meryl (Ironweed)
The Dread Sixth Place Finish?: I was personally nuts for Emily Lloyd's debut in Wish You Were Here but she wasn't Globe nominated so maybe she didn't have traction. Any 80s Oscar obsessives have an idea about who finished sixth that year? I don't have a strong sense of who.

#14 through #11 and more Oscar hoopla after the jump 

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What do the Oscar gowns of the past 22 years tell us?

It's something like an urban legend that actresses only wear gold to the Oscar ceremony if they think they are going to win. But check out this frankly amazing infographic from US Dish for lots of other interesting statistics regarding our favorite public thing (Oscars) and one of our secret favorite things: colorology.

What pleasurable research hours they must have put in! They've broken down Supporting Actress and Actress gowns from 1990-2011 ceremonies to determine the top trends for the nominees based on designer, color, dress style, and hairdo. And they've crunched those numbers further to show which elements are most likely to appear with winners and losers. So, for instance, if you really really really want to win you should be wearing gold with your hair up in a floor length gown designed by Gautier. Or at the very least updo, floor-length, brown Randolph Duke!

IT'S SCIENCE!

It won't surprise you to hear that of the 200+ dresses of the nominees, black was worn most often (28% of the time) but I was mildly surprised to see that red was down in 4th place (8%).

I only wish they would have had a Streep Sidebar, since she's there the most frequently and it's actually really hard to find EVERY Oscar dress worn by one specific actress over the years. Not that I've tried b... okay, I've tried. Don't judge.

SAG Ensemble Flashback: "The Birdcage!" & Oscar Trivia

With the Screen Actors Guild Awards less than a month away, let's look back at the history of our favorite SAG Category, "Outstanding Performance by a Cast" i.e. Best Ensemble. Though the Guild had long been in the business of lifetime achievement awards, they didn't hold their first full fledged awards ceremony until 1995 for the 1994 film year. That first SAG year did not include an Ensemble movie prize which is strange since they handed out TV ensemble prizes from the start so it's not like they hadn't dreamt up that honor! The next year Apollo 13, which was something of a frontrunner for Oscar's Best Picture prize (it eventually lost), won the inaugural ensemble prize. It beat a field that included only one other Oscar Best Picture nominee (Sense & Sensibility)... a percentage ratio you rarely see today.

At the third annual ceremony the award went to the (thankfully) dated gay marriage comedy The Birdcage (1996), based on the 1978 French classic and three-time Oscar nominee La Cage Aux Folles. The films farcical comedy emerges when a gay couple (Robin Williams & Nathan Lane) try to fool a conservative couple (Gene Hackman & Dianne Wiest) into thinking of them as a "reputable" traditional family so that the son can marry the other couple's daughter (Dan Futterman and Calista Flockhart). Everything goes wrong over dinner as the gay couple has a terrible time keeping up the facade.

This is so Guatemala. They put hardboiled things in everything down there. Because, you know, chicken is so important to them. it's their only real currency. A woman is said to be worth her weight in hens and a man's wealth is measured by the size of his cock."

Will you excuse me?"

MORE

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So... Meryl is Really Campaigning This Time, Eh?

The Diva Wears Prada Sweaters and Jeans for her TV profileDid any of you catch Meryl on "60 Minutes" on Sunday? She got one quarter of those minutes. Someone else noted this on Twitter, not I, but it's wonderful to imagine her prep work for these interviews. 'Oh, 60 Minutes is here? I'll just run a comb through my hair.' 

My favorite bits from the 15 minutes

• On the realness of her work becoming the characters: "I'm not insane. I do know that I'm acting!"
• The moment where she "acts" her own voice to demonstrate that she and Thatcher both have "light" voices and you need to take them deeper for dramatic resonance or to be taken seriously. She was also the morning announcer at her high school so THAT VOICE was always drawing attention to itself.

• The actreses she loved when growing up, were not contemporaries but classic movie queens: Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck. 

I like girls with attitude, you know? Moxie. There's an old word."

She also talks about the strength of women repeatedly and is obviously proud of her track record at working with female directors (we have some names for your wishlist Streep!).

• Her flirty "not to me" when asked if the legendary Joe Papp was a taskmaster on stage.
• I didn't know this but during that first flush of stardom one summer post Deer Hunter, she was working on Kramer vs. Kramer and Woody Allen's Manhattan during the day and then playing "Taming of the Shrew" at night on stage! Crazy.

• That they compare Streep to Royalty. So this here then is one of America's royal families. The Gummers.

Mamie (28), Henry (32), Grace (25), Luisa (20) looking up at mom & dad: Meryl and Don

FAV QUOTES, IRON LADY, and OSCARs AFTER THE JUMP.

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Burning Questions: Can You Skip the Precursors?

Michael C here to take stock of the performers left in the dust by the recent rush of precursors. 

With the announcement of the Golden Globes and SAG nominations behind us the first round of the elaborate Kabuki dance known as Precursor Season is concluded. A week ago we could let our imaginations run wild with the possibilities of our favorite performances making good. Now if an actor hasn’t heard his or her name called by either group? Well, as George C. Scott once said to Peter Sellers, their chances have been quickly reduced to a very low order of probability.

So how low is low? What are the chances of a performance getting nominated without a Globe or SAG nomination? 

Approximately 1 in 20. That's what my remarkably un-scientific research tells me. For this I took a look at the last 10 years. If you go back too far the stats become less relevant. Plus, 10 is a nice round number and if I wanted to do complicated math I wouldn’t be a movie blogger. So, 10 years = 200 nominated performances. and out of those only 12 failed to receive either a SAG or GG nod first. They are:

Nominated Without Precursor LoveLead Actor

• Javier Bardem – Biutiful
• Tommy Lee Jones – In the Valley of Elah
• Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby 

Lead Actress

• Laura Linney – The Savages
• Samantha Morton – In America

Supporting Actor

• Michael Shannon – Revolutionary Road
• Alan Alda – The Aviator
• Djimon Hounsou – In America 
• William Hurt - A History of Violence 

Supporting Actress

• Maggie Gyllenhaal – Crazy Heart
• Marcia Gay Harden – Mystic River
• Shohreh Aghdashloo – House of Sand and Fog

12 out of 200 is 6% meaning roughly 1 in 20, or about one a year on average. So contenders have their work cut out for them, or at least their publicists do, if they want to get a ninth inning rally going. 

How to best spot those contenders that are flying under the radar? I admit this might be a Beautiful Mind-like exercise in finding patterns where none exist, but here are the lessons I can draw from recent history, plus the 2011 contenders who may benefit:

Coattails
5 out of 7 of the surprise supporting nominations were for films that also landed nominations in the lead categories, and one of them - Michael Shannon - came close. Only Tommy Lee Jones represented his film’s sole nomination so you need the film to do some of the work for you.
Advantage: Carey Mulligan, Ezra Miller, Judy Greer

Playing Favorites
None of the surprise names in the lead categories were receiving their first nomination. In the big categories don't underestimate the proven vote-getters.
Advantage: Woody Harrelson, Ryan Gosling, Michael Shannon

Category Confusion
A few of these unexpected names were the result of a slot opening up when supporting contenders like Kate Winslet jumped to lead.
Advantage: Nobody. Category placement seems pretty solid this year, no? 

December
Of the 12 curveball nominations listed above only 3 (Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt and Tommy Lee Jones) were from films released prior to Thanksgiving, and none were released prior to September.  Once voters get to the bottom of those screeners currently piling up next to the TV there is bound to be a late-breaking favorite or two.
Advantage: Gary Oldman, Max Von Sydow, Patton Oswalt

Nail It
Of course, when all is said and done it doesn’t hurt to deliver a performance that absolutely tears the house down. I can recall the impact in the theater when Michael Shannon tore through his brief screen time in Revolutionary Road like a wild animal. When that kind of electricity is coming off the screen prognosticators can be forgiven for keeping that person in their predictions no matter what the odds.
Advantage: Vanessa Redgrave, Oliva Colman, Andy Serkis

So if you want to keep rooting for your favorite underdog, there's your sliver of hope. And personally, I think I will keep on clinging to my hopes of a groundswell for Bruce Greenwood's performance in Meek's Cutoff regardless of any logic to the contrary.

Is there an important angle on this I missed? Let me know in the comments. You can follow Michael C. on Twitter at @SeriousFilm or read his blog Serious Film