Countdown to the Oscars: Best Supporting Actress

Alicia Vikander is the frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars for her performance in The Danish Girl.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Supporting Actress

The nominees are:

Jennifer Jason Leigh for The Hateful Eight

Rooney Mara for Carol

Rachel McAdams for Spotlight

Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl

Kate Winslet for Steve Jobs

We can quibble all day over the meaning of “supporting actress” – or more specifically, as this award is officially known, Best Actress in a Supporting Role. I have written a few times throughout this season that while category fraud is common, this year, it has felt rampant, resulting in nominations in this category for two actresses who are unequivocally co-leads in their films.

Anyone who has seen either Carol or The Danish Girl could be forgiven for wondering whom exactly Mara and Vikander are supporting. The same question could be posed, however, for Leigh in The Hateful Eight. The movie is essentially about her, and there is a scarcely a scene in which she does not appear. Each of these actresses has delivered a tremendous performance, but every one of them should have been considered for Best Actress.

Oh, well, no turning back now. It is a campaign strategy that sometimes works and sometimes does not. Marcia Gay Harden (Pollock), Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind), and Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener) all have supporting Oscars for leading roles. However, the first actress we will discuss today can tell you about what happens when the season has its own plans, campaigns be damned.

Kate Winslet for Steve Jobs – Winslet, a seven-time nominee now, earned her only Oscar win for Best Actress in The Reader, this despite master awards campaigner Harvey Weinstein pushing Winslet as a supporting actress. He and many others thought she might have a better chance at the win in the supporting category. There was also some consideration of her clearly leading performance in that year’s Revolutionary Road costing her votes. Ultimately, the Academy nominated her in the proper place for The Reader, and she won because the work was deserving.

This time around, there is no question of category placement. As Joanna Hoffman, Winslet is among the people swirling around the vortex that is Steve Jobs at the center of this film. She is his right-hand woman, his confidant, and his moral center. When he loses his way, she is there to tell him so, and while she cannot always correct his course, she is never afraid to tell him he is wrong.

Most of the other characters in the film are there to be bowled over by Jobs – either awed by his brilliance or cowed by his power. Hoffman is there to stand up to him, and Winslet gives the character a unique blend of inner strength, personal ethics, and business savvy that makes Hoffman memorable and effective. Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay does not always give her the best material, but Winslet takes all that muddled dialogue and creates a real person to whom we can relate and for whom we have sympathy.

Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl – I said back in April last year when I reviewed Ex Machina that 2015 would be a coming-out party for Vikander. Ten months later, I feel safe in saying I was correct. Apart from stunning work in Ex Machina and her nominated performance in The Danish Girl, she also delivered standout turns in Testament of Youth and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Next year, we should see her in Justin Chadwick’s Tulip Fever, Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans, and Paul Greengrass’ Jason Bourne. It seems she is just getting started.

Holding nothing against Eddie Redmayne’s commendable work, The Danish Girl belongs to Vikander. As Gerda Wegener, the wife of someone going through a major life transition, hers is the experience through which the audience understands the story. We understand her confusion, frustration, and hurt over losing the person she thought of as her husband. As Lili’s transition takes over their lives, Gerda’s life and work is put on hold. In showing this pain and struggle, Vikander shoulders as much of the success of the film as Redmayne but has received much less of the credit. An Oscar win would go some way toward righting that perception.

Rooney Mara for Carol – Make no mistake, Carol is about Therese (Mara) as much as if not more than it is about Carol (Cate Blanchett). There is definitely more politicking involved here than with Vikander’s category misplacement as the film’s awards team likely believed Blanchett and Mara would split votes in the lead category. So, Blanchett – the veteran, a seven-time nominee, and two-time winner – was pushed for lead while the young ingénue, herself a previous nominee for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was shoved aside in supporting. In any event, the work is highly deserving of any recognition.

Over the course of a love affair, Mara takes Therese from a shy, innocent girl to a confident, world-weary woman. Therese is never more or less than quiet and reserved, but Mara makes us feel the inner turmoil she wrestles with as she experiences thoughts and feelings she never knew were inside her. Early on, the film seems to be about Carol’s influence over Therese, but as the story progresses, we come to realize it is really about what Therese wants out of her life and what she feels about Carol. Mara sells Therese’s dilemma beautifully with stoicism, grace, and tenderness.

Jennifer Jason Leigh for The Hateful Eight – Not one of those three adjectives could be used to describe Leigh’s unhinged performance as Daisy Domergue, but the work sure is something to behold. Leigh plays Domergue like a woman possessed, but behind the bitterness, sarcasm, and yeah, hate, there lies intelligence, cunning, and strength that let the audience know why so many people are concerned with taking this woman to hang. She takes insult after insult, beating after beating, and she still stands up to spit blood and bile back at her captors.

It is an entirely different look for Leigh, who to this day probably remains best known for her early role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She has spent her career carving a niche in the independent and art film world, and she has excelled in such films as eXistenZ, Margot at the Wedding, and Synecdoche, NY. Here, she lets loose with the rage and demonic force of someone who cannot help but fight, no matter how dire her circumstances. The Hateful Eight is a film about villains, and she may be the biggest villain of all, which just makes her the most fun to watch.

Rachel McAdams for Spotlight – A bit of a surprise nominee, though not wholly out of thin air, McAdams’ nomination seems like evidence of Spotlight’s overall strength with Academy. She plays journalist Sacha Pfeiffer, who is smart, determined, and empathic in the pursuit of the most difficult story of her career. In keeping with the general theme of Spotlight, her work is not flashy but effective. She knows that no matter what she is going through, the story is not about her. It is about the victims and survivors whose suffering she is trying to bring to light.

McAdams shines most in the one-on-one interviews she conducts with survivors, particularly the first, which takes them from a coffee shop to a walk in the park, past one of the many Catholic Churches that litter Boston’s streets. McAdams is expert at showing how Pfeiffer gets the source to trust her and open up about things he has told almost no one in his life. Her heroism comes from the fact that she is not using this man for her own gains. She genuinely wants to help him and all others in his situation the best way she knows how – with the power of the truth.

The final analysis

At the beginning of the awards season, when it looked as though Vikander and Mara would end up in the supporting category, most pundits had this down to those two with a slight edge to Mara for appearing in the more popular Carol. It was not an unreasonable assumption, and most of that has come to pass, except Vikander has really started to run away with things. It is not exactly cut and dry, though, as Winslet won both the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for her performance, while most of the early season critics’ awards went to Leigh and Vikander but for Ex Machina.

The trouble with predicting Winslet, who would be a good bet based on those two major awards, is that she was not nominated against Vikander’s The Danish Girl performance, which was considered a leading performance by both organizations. The only major place they were nominated against each other was the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which Vikander won. I expect that ultimately to be more predictive of the Oscars and for Vikander to win on the strength of her performance, the fact it is a leading role, and her overall body of work this year.

Will win: Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl

Should win: Jennifer Jason Leigh for The Hateful Eight

Should have been here: Günes Sensoy for Mustang

Tomorrow: Best Supporting Actor

New movie review: The Hateful Eight

Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson star in writer-director Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight.

Minnie’s Haberdashery sure is a fine place to stop over in a blizzard. It may not look like much from the outside, but inside, it is downright cavernous. Depending on your preferences, you could settle in by the fire for a game of chess, camp out in the far back corner and read or write, belly up to the bar and imbibe, grab yourself a pot of coffee over by the stove, or trade stories at the communal dinner table. Yes, anything that strikes your fancy, Minnie’s has got it, including jelly beans and peppermint sticks.

Only, you may not like the company you are forced to keep. See, right now, Minnie’s Haberdashery is playing home to a few angry, vengeful souls harboring, let’s just say, mutually exclusive goals. To get out of here alive, you are going to have to survive a beating, a poisoning, a stabbing, a gunfight, and probably a long-winded monologue or two. In this universe, that is just the nature of the beast, and when you find yourself in the hands of the beast master, you are more than likely to end up doused in blood.

Writer-director Quentin Tarantino, the bad boy of U.S. cinema himself, returns with his eighth film, The Hateful Eight, a chamber play masquerading as a bloody western saga. The movie has been billed as, what the residents of the Moulin Rouge might call, spectacular, spectacular – and if it is nothing else, it sure is that. If you are fortunate enough, as I was, to catch one of the film’s highly touted, much-discussed 70mm roadshow screenings, you will be treated to more than a movie. It is an experience, complete with overture, intermission, extended cut, and even a program.

The Hateful Eight roadshow program

The program is a neat little souvenir (see at right), the overture with that great Ennio Morricone score is tremendous, and the intermission is superfluous at best, but let’s be honest. The biggest selling point here is the 70mm, super-widescreen presentation. Your feelings on its success or failure will change based on what theater you attended and what showing you saw. My screening had a couple little hiccups and some things I would have changed, but I have to admit there is something oddly meditative about hearing that huge reel of film click through the projector.

Director of photography Robert Richardson captures some absolutely gorgeous images in the film’s first two chapters, set out in the snowy hills and mountains of Colorado, standing in for Wyoming. The vistas look great and undoubtedly benefit from the expanded field of vision, but then, for the last two-thirds of the movie, Tarantino locks up his characters in Minnie’s Haberdashery, and we rarely go outside again.

So far, reaction among critics and commenters has been sharply divided. Those in the pro camp suggest the 70mm presentation adds depth, nuance, and interest to the interiors, while those in the con camp think it is a wasted opportunity and an injudiciously employed gimmick. I fall somewhere in the middle, believing the wide frame adds to the suspense of watching the characters circle around one another in a single room but acknowledging how nice it would have been to get more of the film’s superb exterior photography.

Ultimately, though, this discussion is a distraction. Tarantino is clearly a fine director, and Richardson’s cinematography is obviously stellar. When you go to a Tarantino movie, though, you expect something else. Tarantino is one of the pre-eminent screenwriters of our time – if not exactly prolific – so those attending The Hateful Eight most likely are looking for the signature dialogue and intricate plotting that has defined most of his career. The disappointment of The Hateful Eight is that it does not quite deliver on that promise.

Frequent Tarantino collaborator Samuel L. Jackson plays Maj. Marquis Warren, a black Civil War officer turned bounty hunter on his way to the city of Red Rock with a fresh haul of bounties – their frozen corpses tied to the roof of a carriage provides one of the more delightfully macabre images in the film. Warren hitches a ride with fellow bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), who is taking prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock to collect the $10,000 bounty. In their travels, they pick up the new sheriff of Red Rock, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins).

Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hateful Eight.

Warren, Ruth, Domergue, and Mannix are our first four “hatefuls.” When they arrive at Minnie’s Haberdashery, hoping to wait out an approaching blizzard, we meet the other four: Gen. Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), Bob “The Mexican” (Demian Bichir), Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), and Joe Gage (Michael Madsen). Based on nothing but a hunch and on having a suspicious nature, Ruth becomes convinced one of these people is partnered up with Daisy and has come here with the intention of helping her break free. This conflict sets the rest of the plot in motion.

The cast of course is incredibly talented and totally game, and they have as much fun as one would hope chewing on Tarantino’s always inventive dialogue. Jackson, who starred in Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Django Unchained and had bit parts in Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds, seems particularly at home in the Tarantino-verse. Leigh also delivers a knockout performance, spitting, snarling, and gnashing her way through the film. Though she is handcuffed and sidelined through most of the action, Domergue’s presence is felt even when she is not around, and that is a credit to Leigh’s performance.

It should surprise no one that Goggins, Dern, Roth, and Russell are also standouts, while Bichir and Madsen do the most they can with the thinnest characters in the script – at least as pertains to the central eight. The actors pretty much universally shine, but they are stranded – literally and metaphorically – in a story that sometimes strains credulity and is a little too amused by its contrivances for its own good.

Without wanting to spoil the events that take place after the intermission, suffice it to say there are two key plot developments that seem to exist for convenience rather than because they grew organically from the events that preceded them. Truth be told, this is unusual territory for one of Tarantino’s films, which generally are expertly plotted and carefully developed. It feels as though Tarantino was in such a hurry to get to the bloody, extended climax that he skipped laying some of the groundwork that might have carried us there.

Now, I do not want to misrepresent myself completely here. As with any Tarantino film, I had a hell of a lot of fun, but none of that fun seemed in service of anything. This certainly feels like the director’s emptiest film. There are some overtures to slavery and the Civil War and an attempt to draw parallels to the racial divide in the modern U.S., but by the second half, when the carnage kicks in, most of that is forgotten in favor of pools of blood and mounds of bodies. There is an entertaining movie in The Hateful Eight, but its flaws are many and glaring – and they sure do make a mess of ol’ Minnie’s Haberdashery.

See it? Yes.