In My Opinion: No Support for Supporting Roles
Star! Expert opines on the gloomy fate of Best Supporting Actor winners
Blog by Star!Expert, Friday, February 24, 2006
In my opinion the Supporting Actor and Actress Oscars are a joke. Beside the fact that no one can remember who won those awards the following day, they seem to go to the most undeserving person in the category.
There seems to be three rules that apply to the Supporting categories…
1) You can win in this category if you’re the oldest person out of the five nominees, and if you’ve given one of your worst performances of your career in an otherwise forgettable comedy. Consider Jack Palance winning for City Slickers, a performance so over-the-top that it seemed ripe for a Razzie not an Oscar… but there was Mr. Palance doing one-handed pushups after his name was called, beating out the considerably more talented Ben Kingsley, Tommy Lee Jones, Michael Lerner and Harvey Keitel. Or how about Don Ameche winning for his comic take on old age in Cocoon… or Sir John Gielgud in Arthur, Melvyn Douglas in Being There, Maggie Smith in California Suite, Helen Hayes in Airport or – wait for it – George Burns in The Sunshine Boys. Call it the “thanks for the memories” award because clearly these people are being rewarded for a body of work and not the performance they gave in these films (although that still doesn’t explain Jack Palance)…
2) You can also win in this category if your studio decides that your lead performance has a better chance of winning in the supporting category… Timothy Hutton was in virtually every scene in Ordinary People but someone decided that it was a supporting role… naturally he won. And Meryl Streep played one of the title characters in Kramer Vs. Kramer but also went the supporting route… naturally she won. Tatum O’Neal not only out-performed her father but was the star of Paper Moon and well, I probably don’t have to tell you how that turned out… it will be interesting to see if Jake Gyllenhaal, nominated as Best Supporting Actor this year for his lead role in Brokeback Mountain, can continue this trend.
3) And finally, if you really want to win a Best Supporting Oscar, make sure you’ve lined up a bunch of crappy movies to star in afterward and that you’re ready for the “whatever happened to” file… remember Mercedes Ruehl? Linda Hunt? Haing S. Ngor? Brenda Fricker? Beatrice Straight? Neither do we but they were all winners of Best Supporting Oscars and then suffered the sophomore slump by starring in disastrous films and quickly dropping off the radar. Cuba Gooding Jr., are you listening?
So there you have it, a foolproof formula for winning one of the most ridiculous Oscar categories… oh wait, did I mention the Best Song category?
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