Countdown to the Oscars: Best Supporting Actress

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Supporting Actress

The nominees are:

Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Hong Chau in The Whale

Kerry Condon in The Banshees of Inisherin

Jamie Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Stephanie Hsu in Everything Everywhere All at Once

This is a mess this year – a big, beautiful, glorious mess. As someone trying to make predictions with at least a little authority, I hate it. As a fan of drama and surprises at the Academy Awards, I love it. I’d normally save this next bit for the final analysis section down below, but it’s just too juicy to wait. Here’s where we stand right now:

For a long time, Angela Bassett was the presumed frontrunner, splitting a lot of the critical accolades with Kerry Condon. But, Bassett is a legend, and there has been a feeling that this is her time. Then, she won the Golden Globe and everything seemed on track. However, Condon came along and won the BAFTA, which as you may know, is my favorite predictor of upsets in the acting categories. So, I was ready to go that way. 

But, the Screen Actors Guild Awards arrived and threw another curveball. Jamie Lee Curtis won. Like Bassett, Curtis is Hollywood royalty and has been doing this thing forever. It wouldn’t be beneath the SAG membership to give an award for a lifetime of achievements, but if that were the case, why Curtis and not Bassett? For what it’s worth, Stephanie Hsu just won the breakthrough performer award at the Independent Spirits, so she’s not out of it either.

The wild card in all of this is that Everything Everywhere All at Once peaked at exactly the right time. It won an unprecedented four SAG awards right as ballots were about to be sent out. It got the WGA and dominated the Indie Spirits with ballots in hand. It looks like a big, historic winner, and nobody doesn’t want to be on the side of that. The problem is: Will Hsu and Curtis split votes? I don’t know. Nobody knows, and it’s great.

Jamie Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere All at Once – I like Curtis a lot. She was a major part of my childhood in movies like Halloween, My Girl, and House Arrest. She’s wonderful in Prom Night, Knives Out, and the Freaky Friday remake. She seems like a fun, funny presence in interviews and when giving speeches. All around, an easy person to root for. I don’t think she’s particularly good in this movie.

Now, she is saddled with playing a humorless IRS agent, a kind of cult enforcer, and the hot dog-fingered lover of Michelle Yeoh in one universe. It’s all pretty thankless. That said, she’s also overdoing it in every single one of those characters. One could say she is matching the tone of the film around her, and that would be correct, but it doesn’t make it good.

Kerry Condon in The Banshees of Inisherin – Sandwiched between Colin Farrell and Cate Blanchett at the top of my list of the performances of the year would be Kerry Condon as Siobhán. Condon is working in every part of the emotional spectrum, bringing dignity, grace, and common sense to the character who serves as the rational center of this wild story. Such characters can often be drag to play, but Condon’s wit and intelligence make Siobhán just as fascinating as the characters that orbit around her.

It’s not just in the big, showy moments we all saw in the trailer, although she nails those, too. Condon wows in the quiet, sad moments that might otherwise fly by under the radar but which add up to a whole character. The first time she heads down to the pub, intent on grabbing a sherry and being a part of the community, there is a spring in her step and a shy smile on her face. The way she turns down Dominick (Barry Keoghan) for a date is so gentle and honest. There are a dozen little moments like these throughout the film, and they never stop impressing each time they crop up.

Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – Bassett knows how to command a room. Ryan Coogler is a magnificent director who knows how to give Bassett the space to shine, but that doesn’t work if Bassett ever gives less than her all, if she ever takes her foot off the gas once. Queen Ramonda must command the respect of every single person in the room at all times, and Bassett accomplishes this through sheer force of will.

A lot has been made of Bassett being the first acting nominee from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I would argue it’s more remarkable that this recognition is coming for a performer playing a hero. Villains always tend to stand out in comic book movies. They get to have more fun. They’re bigger, bolder. That is why both Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix won Oscars for playing the Joker and no one has ever been nominated for playing Batman. Heroes tend to be too one-note in comic book movies. They are stoic, determined, and representative of a moral certitude that may work in battling evil but doesn’t offer an actor much in the way of range. Bassett cuts through all of that to find depth and layers in a monarch beset on all sides by enemies and standing up to protect her family and her kingdom.

Stephanie Hsu in Everything Everywhere All at Once – Speaking of villains that get to go big, Hsu swings for the fences as this film’s central antagonist, Jobu Tupaki. In a different universe, we are meant to have sympathy for her as Joy Wang, daughter of a chilly, withholding mother. Hsu seems to have a perfect read on both characters, and for all the dumb things the movie makes her do, we at least believe in the characters underneath it all.

You might know Hsu from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon or from Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, but this performance was really the first time I took notice of her. Her strength, spirit, and intensity all jump off the screen, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Hong Chau in The Whale – I have not had a chance to see the Kelly Reichardt film Showing Up that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May. If, however, it is as good as I have heard, then Chau truly had one of the great years in recent memory. In addition to having Showing Up at Cannes, she had a major role in box-office hit The Menu and garnered this Oscar nomination for The Whale. And though The Whale has not been particularly loved by critics, Chau has received nothing but plaudits for her work.

She plays Liz, a kind of nurse/caretaker to Brendan Fraser’s morbidly obese Charlie. She is protective of him but never coddles him, always urging him to get to a hospital and get his life together. As the film goes on, we learn the depth of their connection, and Liz’s actions take on more meaning and nuance. Chau plays all of this beautifully, matching Fraser’s energy in scene after scene. When she breaks down, Chau makes us feel the wait of her burden and all the pain it is causing her.

The final analysis

Okay, so what are we doing? Let’s look at the recent history of each of the major awards bodies and see which is most vulnerable and which seems right on the money. We’ll use 2010 as a cutoff:

Golden Globes – They have matched with the Oscars nine of the past 12 years. The three they missed were 2020 when Youn Yuh-jung won the Oscar but was not even nominated at the Globes (Jodie Foster won for The Mauritanian in an all-time strange victory); 2015 when Alicia Vikander won the Oscar for The Danish Girl (the Globes went with Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs, who beat Vikander who was nominated for Ex Machina); and the historically close 2013 race when Jennifer Lawrence won the Globe but Lupita Nyong’o memorably won the Oscar.

Screen Actors Guild – The guild has matched the Oscars 11 of the past 12 years. The only miss came in 2018 when the Oscar went to Regina King, who was not nominated at the SAG Awards. The guild went with Emily Blunt for The Quiet Place, a performance that was not even nominated at the Academy Awards.

BAFTAs – The Brits are spottier. They have matched eight times in 12 years. They missed in 2010, going with Helena Bonham Carter for The King’s Speech (eventual Oscar winner Melissa Leo was not nominated). They missed that 2013 race, also going with Lawrence over Nyong’o. They matched the Globes in 2015, going with Winslet over Vikander, who was again nominated for Ex Machina, not The Danish Girl. And, in 2018, like at the SAG Awards, King was not nominated, clearing the way for Rachel Weisz in The Favorite.

Going back to the beginning of the SAG Awards in 1994, only once has a performer won the Oscar without winning at least one of these major awards first (that was Marcia Gay Harden for Pollock in 2000, a performance not even nominated anywhere but the Oscars). So, we can safely eliminate Hong Chau and Stephanie Hsu, though if Hsu wins on the wave of Everything Everywhere All at Once momentum, we shouldn’t be surprised.

The Golden Globes are a weirdo organization, grasping at straws to regain their relevance, and as great as Angela Bassett is, I think she’s running in third place. There may also be an element of MCU bias here, as well. It would be tough to imagine voters getting over that, though they’ve never minded rewarding actors playing the Joker in Batman movies.

So, Curtis or Condon? Well, over more than a decade, the SAG Awards have been the more accurate predictor in this category compared to the BAFTAs, so I’m forced to predict Jamie Lee Curtis. I’m at peace with that. If she wins, I will be right. If she loses to Condon, I will be happy to be wrong. If anything else happens, well, I was never going to get it anyway. That’s it. Curtis. Final answer.

Will win: Jamie Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Should win: Kerry Condon in The Banshees of Inisherin

Should have been here: Claire Foy in Women Talking

A note about my favorite snub: I mentioned this in my Adapted Screenplay piece, but Women Talking should have been up for a lot more Oscars than the two for which it is nominated. That it received no acting nominations for an ensemble that could easily have made up the entirety of this category will forever baffle me. I could have gone with anyone from the cast in this spot, and Jessie Buckley in particular was brilliant, but if I have to pick one, it’s Claire Foy. Her speech about protecting her children is one of the great movie moments of the year and will stay with me long after this Oscars season has passed.

Next time: Best International Feature

New movie review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Letitia Wright as Shuri in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Sequels are hard. Sequels in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are harder still. Making the followup to what was once the most successful standalone superhero film of all time in the wake of your leading actor’s tragic death: near impossible. But the gears of corporate movie making grind away, demanding the next big thing.

Director and co-writer Ryan Coogler gives it his best shot, and while Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is not a perfect film, nor does it quite rise to the level of its predecessor, it is the best anyone could have done under the circumstances. Wakanda Forever is smart, subversive, and filled to the brim with excellent performances by a game cast who deliver comic book exposition like it is Shakespearean verse.

The missing cast member, of course, is Chadwick Boseman, whose absence looms over the whole film. Boseman died of colon cancer in August 2020 at the age of 43, leaving a whole in the hearts of family, friends, and fans alike. Though it was likely considered, there was no replacing Boseman, who put his stamp indelibly on King T’Challa and the Black Panther. 

Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole would have to adjust their plans and rewrite a sequel that was already in the works. They would have to address the tragedy directly. There could be no quickly moving on from one of the iconic characters of modern times. After all, the first film is the highest-grossing live-action film with a black lead of all time. It was a cultural event with meaning that far outstripped its place in the MCU. It became the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, where it won three Oscars. And it made Boseman a hero to a generation of black audiences that had been and remain historically underserved by big-budget Hollywood movies.

The film opens with the offscreen death of T’Challa, as we watch his sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), in her lab, desperately seeking a cure for his unnamed illness. Her idea: to create a synthetic version of the purple heart-shaped herb that Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger destroyed the last of in the first film. Her mother, Quen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), arrives to tell her she is too late. T’Challa is dead.

What follows is the first of the film’s many gorgeously crafted sequences – a lengthy Wakandan funeral that is equal parts reverent and exultant. It is intended as an opportunity for the audience to grieve Boseman as much as it is an opportunity for the Wakandans to grieve their king. It works on both counts and sets up one of the central themes of the film: How does a nation, a people, move forward without its protector and patch the hole in its soul?

We quickly learn that world powers see Wakanda as weakened and the loss of the Black Panther as a chance to pilfer the nation’s reserves of vibranium, thought to exist only in Wakanda. However, we soon discover there is another source of the precious metal, deep in the Atlantic Ocean, in the heretofore unknown underwater kingdom of Talokan. The Talokan people, led by the centuries old mutant Namor (Tenoch Huerta), defend their territory from the mining operation, which leads to increased international scrutiny of Wakanda.

If this sounds like a lot already, it is, and Wakanda Forever’s greatest sin is that it is overstuffed with side characters and plots meant only to service the greater MCU story. This is not the fault of the filmmakers, necessarily, but rather one of the burdens of operating within the massive Marvel machine. Among these side characters, we get the return of Martin Freeman’s Agent Ross and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ CIA Director de Fontaine. We are also introduced to Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, a brilliant MIT student who invents a machine for detecting vibranium.

Thorne is great in the role, and I enjoyed much of what the Riri character brings to the movie, but along with the CIA plot, it is one thing too many in a movie that already has so much to deal with. We also get a side plot with Danai Gurira’s Dora Milaje general Okoye as she grapples with her place in the new Wakandan order. And the always-great-to-see Lupita Nyong’o is back as Nakia, a former Wakandan spy who now runs a foundation for children in Haiti.

As great as Gurira, Nyong’o, and Thorne are, it is all too much. The film is at its best when it focuses on its three central characters: Queen Ramonda, Princess Shuri, and Namor. It helps that Bassett, Wright, and Huerta give the three best performances in the film. Bassett, in particular, is just stunning in her power and control. When they all meet on a river bank about a third of the way through the film, the fireworks are instantaneous and the key conflict of the story is set into motion.

At the end of Black Panther, T’Challa reveals Wakanda’s power to the world, ending centuries of isolationism. This inadvertently places Talokan at risk due to the world’s newly born hunger for vibranium. Namor insists that Wakanda form an alliance with Talokan and go on the offensive to protect their nations from any would-be invaders. Like Killmonger in the first film, he wishes to burn the world to save his people. If Queen Ramonda refuses the partnership, Namor says he will destroy Wakanda as a show of strength and go on to burn the world anyway.

Namor and the Talokan people are clearly Latin coded, descended from Mayans who took to the seas to avoid destruction and enslavement at the hands of white settlers. They do so using a plant that bears similar properties to the heart-shaped herb of the Black Panther. One can easily see the seams where Namor would have been set up as a mirror to T’Challa – superpowered protectors of their people with differing views on what protection means. Instead, Shuri must fill this role, and it becomes a story of the destructive power of vengeance and the need to work through grief.

Similar to Killmonger in the first film, Namor makes a good point. It is highly likely that (probably white) invaders will come to destroy his people in order to steal their resources. We have already seen similar attempts on Wakandan resources. It becomes a matter of whether these two nations of color will come to war with each other over their disagreement on how to deal with outside forces beyond their control.

These are heady, fascinating dilemmas, and no one but Coogler is infusing the big-budget Hollywood machine with these kinds of radical discussions and ideas. The reason Coogler’s antagonists – neither Killmonger nor Namor is a “villain” in the traditional sense – are the best in the MCU is because they are complicated and in many ways correct. They have a point of view. They are not kill-crazy mad men lusting for power. Their goals stem from real cultural and political ideologies that come into conflict with Wakanda’s sense of justice.

Other MCU films do not ask these kinds of questions. They are mostly about their protagonists learning to be heroes and dealing with the responsibilities of what that means. Though the plots often involve world-altering stakes, the themes are generally quite small in their ambitions. Among the rest, only Captain America: Civil War really even attempts to look outward and consider the political and social ramifications of these narratives.

Maybe that is a lot to lay at the feet of a piece of blockbuster ephemera. But more than any other director working in the MCU, Coogler seems to understand that these stories need not be ephemeral. Superhero movies are the westerns of our time – the dominant cultural force, encompassing both the film and TV worlds and crafting the iconography of the era. They feature larger-than-life heroes operating against clear villains in worlds of strict moral codes. The thing about westerns, though, is that most of them are forgotten, or at the very least not particularly well remembered.

The ones that stood the test of time were those that dealt with themes that resonate beyond the screen. Films like High Noon and The Ox-Bow Incident last because they are unafraid to delve into the murkiness of real life and the gray areas in which most people live. For whatever flaws the sequel has, both Black Panther films share this essential trait. So as other superhero flicks fade from memory, Coogler’s willingness to engage the audience in meaningful moral debate ensures that we will remember Wakanda – forever.

See it? Yes.