Oscars 2010: Supporting Actor/Actress

The supporting categories are the ones that are the closest thing to a lock this year. I'll try to keep this brief since my predictions coincide with who I want to see win and there's not much left to say except to sum up some of the other highlights of the year.

Supporting Actor

It is unbelievable to me that Christopher Waltz wasn't really known until this moment in time. I thought maybe he had just done things overseas that I just wasn't aware of, but from his wiki article it seems that he was a German tv actor before this. Now, maybe these shows are like, the Lost of Germany and that's how he came to the attention of Tarantino, but it's still a big leap. I want to say that he's too talented to be mostly a character actor, but I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. Besides, can you really be typecast as a slightly fruity homicidal genius? Only in the Hollywood of my dreams. Either way, the role is perfect and I can't imagine what the movie would have been without his contribution. It takes Daniel Day-Lewis levels of talent to create the layers upon layers of personality that Waltz managed to convey. Evil artistic genius.

I said yesterday that I was impressed with Matt Damon in Invictus. I think mostly that I'm impressed by how much I have enjoyed Damon's career. He manages to be a believable action star, but then plays second fiddle to Clooney and Pitt in Ocean's 11, makes cameos in Kevin Smith movies, jokes around with the likes of Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel, plays gritty and corrupt in The Departed, etc, etc. And now the inspirational racial tension movie. I think he does well with the material. It could easily be cliche, but from him I find it believable and touching.

He's not really my type, but I'd do him if that's what it took to get a laugh.

Ok, who else do we have...haven't seen Last Station or Lovely Bones, so that just leaves Woody Harrelson. Talk about someone who is typecast with some regularity. I think some of this nomination may have come from surprise that Harrelson has such depth and range. But it's not all surprise - he really is an excellently complex character in a great movie. I think I was less surprised by how good he was than I was by how much this movie was one of my favorite pre-Oscar viewings. In a movie that basically has grief and sadness as its entire plot, he manages to wring out a few moments that made me feel devastated for him. And it's not even that anything that bad is happening to him. He's basically reacting to someone else's awful story at the time, but he's just displaying all of the emotion that he holds in at every other moment in the few seconds it takes to get another beer from the kitchen. Like I said before, it's hard to watch this kind of stuff when you're depressed about other things, and those few seconds were hard.

Supporting Actress

Talk about funny, how about that comedienne Mo'Nique in her first Oscar nomination? Oh, right. Oscars = sad. There's one big monologue towards the end of the movie, and if that were her only screen time in the entire film, I would still say it was totally warranted. I cry at movies, it's no secret to anyone who has sat through one with me, even when it's a multiple-viewings situation. So when I tell you that I still cry during V for Vendetta, even though I've seen it dozens of times, then you should understand how I was during Precious. I had to struggle, during that monologue in particular, not to do a full-out wail in the middle of the theater. But that wasn't her entire scene, and even in the little things she defined that movie for me. Every time I think of the title to the movie, I hear her voice saying it, yelling it, with a cigarette in her hand and a scarf on her head.

"I'm laughing on the inside because this movie is too goddamned depressing."

Two nominations for the Up in the Air actresses, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick. I adored Vera in The Departed, so I'm happy to see her playing Clooney's female alter-ego in this role. She fools everyone about who she really is, and finding out at the end makes all the memories of her tainted by the hindsight. It's like when you get broken up with in a horrible, nasty way, and it's suddenly impossible to believe that you ever thought they were a decent person. Hopefully I haven't revealed too much so that it taints your own viewing of the film. Ah, who am I kidding, only a couple of people are reading this anyway and they've already seen the movie. So, Kendrick. I'd like to say that I saw her talent coming from a mile away, from the moment she said, "I know, right?" after Mike calls Bella funny in the first Twilight movie. To be honest, I did like her in the movies, but that's easy enough to say when she gets 5 minutes of screen time compared to 46 minutes of Kristen Stewart's twitching eyeballs. Before now I never would have envisioned her for this movie, but I'm happy that she has it. She plays the part of high-strung overachiever very well, but I look forward to seeing what else she might be able to do in the future. A good showing for a first nomination, though.

Could Anna play Bella? Maybe. But Kristen definitely could not have played Natalie. So it worked out for the best.

You know, the more I think about that movie, the more I think I was too hard on Clooney yesterday. I was remembering the first part of the movie, when it's just him being him. I forgot how well he played off the women in the film, how much their characters challenged and reflected his in unexpected ways. Sorry, George.

Do you remember last year at the Oscars, when Kate Winslet won and she was naming off her fellow nominees and she had a brain fart and couldn't remember that Angelina Jolie was the other one nominated because hardly anyone had seen The Changeling, let alone thought Jolie should be nominated for it? At least, that's how I felt. And Penelope Cruz is my brain fart this year. I can rattle off all the others, but I forget that Cruz is even nominated. I didn't like Nine. I found it long and boring and self-indulgent. It should have been something I liked - it was a musical, it had dream-sequence numbers, Daniel Day-Lewis, Rob Marshall, etc, etc. I fully expected to like it, but I had inklings that I might not when I found out that the cast included Fergie. She wasn't awful and the song was kinda catchy, but there's just something I find completely unattractive about her - the combination of her demeanor, lack of ability to perform live, fashion, the face that looks like the end result of an experiment in plastic surgery techniques, I don't like it. What were we talking about? Oh right, Cruz. Actually, her acting was some of the best of the film, but that doesn't save it from being craptastic.

I said it the other day - Crazy Heart is a great movie and you should see it. I wasn't surprised that Maggie Gyllenhaal was good, but sometimes it's hard to tell because in the same way that Fergie is inexplicably unattractive to me, I like Gyllenhaal for reasons I can't always explain. Except for the fact that I have to constantly review how to spell her last name. Maybe its her hipster vibe, her indie choices in film roles, her relation to Jake, or her marriage to Peter Sarsgaard, whom I have had an intensified crush on ever since seeing An Education. Whatever it is, I like her. But I think this role could have been phoned in or taken to a place that would have been annoying, and I admire her for avoiding that. She's part groupie (and it is only the charisma of Jeff Bridges keeping that from being an unpalatable thought), part southern single mother, part alcoholic-enabler. But she gives those roles backbone and prevents them from being a pitiable existence.

So that's that. Predictions are for the heavy-favorites, Waltz and Mo'Nique, and I wouldn't ask for anyone else to win. Others had good or great performances, but those two can't be topped.