HBO’s LGBT History Oscar Break: 2003 Acting Races
Wednesday, February 24, 2016 at 10:36AM Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.
Last week we played a fun game of Oscar What If… imagining how Roger Spottiswoode’s And the Band Played On might have shifted the supporting actor and actress categories at the 1993 Academy Awards had it been released theatrically. This week we’re jumping ten years ahead and looking at the 2003 Oscar acting races and trying to suss out whether Jane Anderson’s Normal (which we discussed in depth a while back) could have made waves in the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories.
Given that it was released the same year as the towering Angels in America it’s not surprising that Anderson’s Normal (based on her own play) went home empty-handed from all the end of year awards handed out despite featuring two dazzling performances that are usually awards-bait gold: Tom Wilkinson plays Roy Applewood who embarks on a transition to become the person he’s always known herself to be: Ruth; while Lange played his supportive wife, Irma. Indulge me if you will in imagining this Sundance Film Festival-screening title making it to theaters across the country and mounting campaigns that could have jockeyed for nominations the year Lord of the Rings: Return of the King swept the Oscars.
Best Actor
Sean Penn - Mystic River
Jude Law - Cold Mountain
Ben Kingsley - House of Sand and Fog
Bill Murray - Lost in Translation
Johnny Depp - Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Left outside looking in: Golden Globe nominees Russell Crowe (Master and Commander), Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai) in the Drama side, and perhaps even Jack Nicholson (Something’s Gotta Give) from the Comedy category, BAFTA nominee Benicio del Toro (21 Grams), Indie Spirit Award nominees Paul Giamatti (American Splendor) and SAG/Indie Spirit Award nominee Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent). Reminder: the Indie Spirits also nominated Lee Pace for his fearless work in that other made-for-TV trans drama, Showtime’s Soldier’s Girl, which also won him a Breakthrough Award at the Gothams.
A crowded category, don’t you think? Having an eventual Best Picture winner without any correlative acting nominees can sometimes do that, though the Academy’s decision to ignore the great work being done by Elijah Wood in the Lord of the Rings trilogy always surprised me (though it shouldn’t have). Everyone knew Murray would be in the mix (and some hoped he’d win) and once Mystic River took off, we knew Penn would join him (his BAFTA nominated work in 21 Grams surely helped). Depp’s nomination was such a welcome surprise and a wonderful anomaly for AMPAS, which leaves us with Kingsley and Law as the only “vulnerable” men who might have made way for someone else.
Law’s nomination seems the most disposable of the five mostly because it seemed more of an afterglow nomination (and really it pales in comparison to his Ripley performance) attached to a project that Zée aside, seemed to flounder under its own weight. Might Wilkinson, who’d earned his first ever nomination two years prior (for In the Bedroom) have jockeyed successfully for that fifth spot with his nuanced work as a man transitioning?
Let's take a look at the ladies vrying for supporting honors.
Best Supporting Actress
Renée Zellweger - Cold Mountain
Shohreh Aghdashloo - House of Sand and Fog
Marcia Gay Harden - Mystic River
Patricia Clarkson - Pieces of April
Holly Hunter - thirteen
Left outside looking in: Golden Globe nominee Hope Davis (American Splendor) and Maria Bello (The Cooler) — also a SAG nominee — as well as BAFTA nominees Laura Linney (Mystic River), Emma Thompson (Love Actually) (!) and Judy Parfitt (Girl with a Pearl Earring). Add also Indie Spirit Award nominees Sarah Bolger (In America) and Frances McDormand (Laurel Canyon) and you have quite a roster of actresses to which one should also add Christina Ricci (Monster) and Catherine O’Hara (A Mighty Wind) who couldn't turn Best Actress heat and Oscar meta-storylines work for them that year.
This was always going to be Zée’s to lose, as we all know, since she was an unstoppable force both in the film and at the precursors (those previous two Oscar nominations helped lay the ground for her eventual win), but as we discovered at the Smackdown a few years back, not many are pleased with that outcome. Could two-time Oscar winner Lange have crashed this category with her touching portrayal of Irma Applewood, especially as it’d have inadvertently echoed Lange’s first win for Tootsie? It’d have required the Academy to embrace a veteran it hadn’t shown much love towards since her last win in 1995 but in a year where they went with two “new” Oscar faces (Aghdashloo and Clarkson) from films that found little love elsewhere, one can imagine a world in which the “Lange is back” narrative could have knocked either from the lineup — Mystic River’s strength would have helped Gay Harden regardless, while Hunter’s turn would’ve been hard to ignore.
That said, that Lange missed on a SAG nom that year even in the TV side perhaps suggests the subject matter may not have resonated with enough voters in larger groups to help land her the (still elusive) lucky number 7 nomination. That we’ve since lost her to TV means that unless someone writes her a killer role soon, she’ll remain sitty pretty at #11 in Nathaniel’s Oscar Actress Hierarchy (she was #10 when the post was written but Blanchett’s 7th nom leapfrogged her and Winslet may do the same should she win her second Oscar this Sunday).
Next Week: We return to our regularly scheduled programming by looking at Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro, Sr, the personal documentary that the Oscar winning actor made about his late (and gay) father.
Reader Comments (19)
Is it possible to talk about the merits of this TV movie without conjuring a nightmare universe in which Jude Law got no love for Cold Mountain?
To be honest, I don't really understand your angle. I feel weirdly insulted for the cinema that you're entertaining this discussion.
Lange won the Emmy for Normal in Lead Actress. Why insist on supporting placement for a theoretical Oscar campaign?
I think the subject matter at that point would have probably precluded them scoring noms though I'd have much rather seen them there rather than Law and Zellweger. Even if they had though the supporting actress award should have gone to Shohreh Aghdashloo's amazing performance.
That Best Actor lineup is so good it'd be a shame to interrupt it. One of the few times Oscar picked pretty much everyone I would have gone for.
The bottom line here is that there is so much really great work done on TV movies and series that the performances are in no way second tier. It isn't necessary to crowbar Wilkinson or Lange into an Oscar race to prove that they were as worthy of note or appreciation.
It's time to put away that notion of the Oscars as being the "Big Leagues" and TV/Cable being the "Farm Team".
Let's appreciate great acting for what it is - no matter where it is.
Hayden -- why feel insulted? We've always loved "what if?" games like this. But i think if you're open to Normal competing I'd want to assume that Angels would also compete and then you would have the most competitive categories ever across the board.
I do think Law was most vulnerable in that Actor lineup which is a pity since he's easily giving the best performance in all of Cold Mountain.
I still struggle to wrap my head around Clarkson getting in for a tiny awful indie movie instead of her much more successful turn in THE STATION AGENT
What a scattered year! I'll also speak up for Jude Law, since I think he's really rather magnificent in Cold Mountain, bridging a lot of the gaps in the adaptation that I don't think the other actors always are (although I think Portman's performance is under-recognised too). But I agree that he was probably the most vulnerable...
Nathaniel - Clarkson had cancer in Pieces of April. And was playing the lead's mother. A mother with cancer. Oscar LOVES a mother with cancer. Probably almost as much as a hooker with a heart of gold, although there are (shockingly!) less films made about cancer-ridden mothers than there are about hookers.
Two corrections to Manuel and 3rtful:
1. Normal was not up against Angels in America at the Emmys. Normal competed at the 2003 Emmys for the 2002-2003 TV season and lost to Door to Door. Angels was released at the end of 2003 and therefore competed the following year for the 2003-3004 season.
2. While it's true that Lange was nominated in Lead at the Emmys, she did NOT won. She lost her category to Maggie Smith for My House in Umbria.
The tricky deadlines for various awards shows complicate easy comparisons. While Angels in America and Normal didn't compete at the Emmys, they did compete at the Golden Globes (and yes, Lange lost both nods: to Smith at the Emmys and to Meryl at the Globes).
I ended up putting Lange in Supporting mostly because a) I wanted to talk about that Supporting Acting race and b) because she really is playing that most rewarded of "supporting roles." Call it me giving her a Jennifer Connelly placement.
And Hayden, do know that this is more fun and games — most of us complain that when we try to rejigger past Oscar races we seldom look at the actual logistics of how nominations are won and lost. If we say someone "should've been nominated" we should be ready to say at whose expense. I love Law as an actor but I have to admit that I never warmed up to Cold Mountain so perhaps it behooves me to revisit it and perhaps I'll find something there that I'm missing. But it's clear that he was the most vulnerable of the five men that year, that's not just me playing favorites.
In any case, for those of you who haven't seen Normal, you really should as it's a beautiful quiet piece with two devastating performances at its heart which, ultimately, is what this roundabout Oscar post was meant to remind you.
I saw this last year, and it completely floored me. Lange and Wilkinson work miracles.
Lange in Normal is surely more leading than Morton in In America
Count me another fan of the acting in Cold Mountain with one Oscar-winning exception: Law, Kidman, Portman, Donald Sutherland, Eileen Atkins, Kathy Baker, James Gammon, Brendan Gleeson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Hunnam, Giovanni Ribisi, Cillian Murphy, Richard Brake, Ethan Suplee, Jay Tavare, Jack White, Ray Winstone, Lucas Black, Melora Walters, Taryn Manning, Emily Deschanel, Jena Malone...
Ahhhh, Kathy Baker. A wonderful artist.
Why is Lange not getting Mirren's roles i'd like to know,she's far more gifted.
Bill Murray and Patricia Clarkson still should've won and Scar-Jo 3:16 got robbed of an Oscar nod.
I don't know where I would put Scarlett.
Jude Law is great in Cold Mountain, which could've been a good movie had it not been for an extremely annoying, big, loud, bullshit performance from Zellweger. I remember thinking that performance was awful when I first saw that movie, glad to see most people now agree with me. I was only 18 when Cold Mountain came out and it made me wonder how I could see how bad that performance was, but the academy voters loved it. First time I started to suspect Academy voters don't even see the movies and vote for what they heard was good. I also remember that being one of those races where she had been declared the winner before the movie even came out. Sometimes I think the Internet might be the worst thing for the Oscars, hyping up movies and performance before they come out. Used to be you'd go see a movie because someone, whose opinion you trusted, told you it was worth watching now it's all about being hyped up on the Internet.
Does it strike anyone as curious Kidman and Zellweger were guaranteed Oscars after losing to Halle Berry? This does not mean Oscar wins weren't inevitable for both women but in consecutive years directly after it felt like an agenda. All three of these Oscar wins are unpopular for the agenda factor and whatever quibbles people had with the performances themselves.