OVP: Best Supporting Actor (2017)
The Nominees Were...
Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
My Thoughts: We are hitting the final stretch of the 2017 races over the next week-and-a-half, doing our supporting races in the next three days, and then the final four (plus our ballot!) all of next week. We'll start that out as always with Best Supporting Actor, a field that included a lot of names but that I (looking back on my predictions) got exactly right. Part of that was correctly calling out an actor who was only in this category accidentally, the late Christopher Plummer. Plummer had one of the biggest late-staged comebacks in Oscar history, getting three nominations over the age of eighty, an unrivaled situation that no one else will likely ever match. We'll commence our writeup thus with Plummer as our entry point.
Plummer plays his J. Paul Getty less as a feeble old miser and more as someone who has lost his grip on reality decades earlier, having unlimited wealth in a way no man can have without it warping his mind. Plummer's performance here is good, particularly his chaotic one-on-one scenes with both Mark Wahlberg & Michelle Williams, where he unfolds what it's like to be a man no one says no to in real time. The performance feels a little bit half-baked, as Plummer famously only had a few weeks before the movie's release date to replace Kevin Spacey after Spacey became unemployable, and there's a whiff of the industry acknowledging Plummer for doing them a favor by stepping in at the last minute to this nomination...you get the sense that even if he was terrible he'd have gotten this citation as a "thank you." He's not, he's good, but it's a pity he hadn't been cast at the beginning since I think some more time to parcel through this role might've made this his worthiest of nominations.
Richard Jenkins was cast from the beginning, but I can't help but feeling he also should've been recast in The Shape of Water. It's refreshing to have an average-looking man play a gay character onscreen (too often we see aging gay men only when they're about to die in the movies), but I couldn't help but feeling there's something authentic lacking here. Quite frankly Jenkins, who is straight in real life, is not convincing as a gay man, never understanding the tragedy of his sad character and other than one late scene, feeling simply to exist as a "sassy gay friend" for our more fully-drawn main character of Eliza. The script doesn't care about him, and Jenkins doesn't define the role enough to rise above that castoff.
Willem Dafoe has been on fire in recent years, getting a well-deserved career renaissance that spurred from The Florida Project. His work as a motel manager, left to deal with people living week-to-week, paycheck-to-paycheck is so well-done because his motives remain unclear. Whom does he care about other than himself as the movie progresses...how much did he actually help the patrons who are clearly about to have their lives thrown away if they can't stay in this motel (it's literally the only place keeping them out of shelters or the streets)...Dafoe keeps this vested inside, but lets enough out to finally get you to understand his character in the movie's final moments. It's a master class of understatement from an actor not necessarily known for such restraint.
Our final two nominees are both from Three Billboards, the first time there was a double supporting actor nominee from the same film since 1991's Bugsy. Of the two, Woody Harrelson is my favorite. I loved the way that his world-weary cop unfolds against the plot. Harrelson, like Dafoe, is not known for understatement in his professional work, but here he finds it as a man who is in a new marriage, someone who understands the plight of our main character of Mildred, but also knows the parameters of what the law will allow him to do-he is the center of this film, keeping it tethered to reality, and also bears the weight of all of the unsolved cases that have come before him. It's a great, small piece of acting in a film that loses its grounding when he disappears from the story.
Which leads us to Sam Rockwell. Rockwell is not one of my favorite actors...in fact, I've always struggled with him as an onscreen performer, frequently feeling too flashy, too scenery-chewing...in some ways my reaction to him is similar to some of that of Philip Seymour Hoffman in the early Aughts, an actor who could be great but oftentimes gave into his theatrical roots when the character doesn't call for it. It doesn't help Rockwell that the script doesn't have a clue how to handle his racist cop, but you shouldn't be forgiven & given an Oscar if you get saddled with a bad screenplay and don't make it worse. Throw in a borderline case of category fraud, and I'm still baffled as to why this was the performance that finally won the long-neglected Rockwell over to the Academy.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes went with Sam Rockwell as their victor against Plummer, Jenkins, Dafoe, & Armie Hammer (Call Me By Your Name), while SAG chose Rockwell atop Jenkins, Harrelson, Dafoe, & Steve Carell (Battle of the Sexes). BAFTA completed the set for Rockwell, beating Plummer, Dafoe, Harrelson, & Hugh Grant (Paddington 2), the latter of whom wasn't eligible for Oscar until the following year due to release date timing (he didn't get nominated for the Oscar, but I nominated him in 2018 for My Ballot as he's excellent in this movie). In terms of sixth place, I called this entire lineup right (as I said above), mostly because I figured that the two actors from Call Me By Your Name (Hammer & Michael Stuhlbarg) would split the vote enough that neither would make it. My gut says that Stuhlbarg, who has the aura of a "character actor who gets his one Oscar nomination at some point" was in sixth since he was also in Best Picture nominees The Shape of Water and The Post, but Hammer in 2017 had also been itching around an Oscar nomination for a while & that would've been a possible place for him (at this point, of course, Hammer, like the aforementioned Kevin Spacey, is unemployable, but coming off of The Social Network and J. Edgar a nomination felt inevitable).
Performances I Would Have Nominated: Hammer is undoubtedly the lead in his movie, and while I'll try to base that category solely on the performance (so he's a probable nominee for me even with his personal life being a horror show), this is not the place for him. Stuhlbarg, on the other hand, with his fantastic final monologue...Oscar has no excuse for skipping.
Oscar’s Choice: The Globes had a choice between honoring the long-neglected Rockwell or the long-neglected Dafoe, and they chose the former...to which every other awards body followed suit in the most lock-step acting award season in recent memory.
My Choice: Easily it's Dafoe-this is the performance of his career, and deserved the Oscar, particularly against an otherwise average lineup. I'd follow with Harrelson, Plummer, Jenkins, & Rockwell in the back.
Those are my thoughts-what are yours? Do you go with the entire awards season & the work of Sam Rockwell, or do you want to come over and sun with Willem Dafoe & I in The Florida Project? Why do you think it's so rare to have double nominees from the same film in supporting categories today (it used to be far more common)? And which of the Call Me By Your Name men was in sixth place? Share your thoughts below in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment