A truth. Year after year, Best Supporting Actor is the category with which we have the most disagreement with Oscar. Before our hearts are broken anew this impending season we wanted to celebrate the decade that's nearly behind us. We tend to view it Best Supporting Actor as the category wherein the Academy acting branch is at their absolute laziest each year, though we've never quite figured out why so much of their laziness funnels into this category ("whoever's in a best picture! YOU")
Today, for fun, a grumpy what-coulda-been list celebrating ten performances that rank among the best supporting work this decade...
10 BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR PERFORMANCES OF THE '10s
THAT WERE NOT OSCAR NOMINATED
10 Tracy Letts, Lady Bird
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: All but Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project
Want to buy him all the "World's Greatest Dad" mugs for this performance. This kind of warm performance easily finds a home in Supporting Actress but "Supportive" fathers are a no go for voters for reasons we've never been able to ascertain apart from basic toxic masculinity... and that being supportive is just not considered an interesting or valuable thing in a male role...
09 Oscar Isaac, Ex Machina
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: ALL though we'd hear arguments for the two frontrunners
Mad scientist filtered through hedonistic oversexed isolation. Inspired and riveting throughout.
08 Samuel L Jackson, Django Unchained
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: All but Tommy Lee Jones in Lincoln
Number one reason we hate category fraud: It prevents worthy actual supporting performances from getting their just due recognition. Waltz had no business drawing attention away from the film's best performance: Jackson was running circles around everyone in this film and what's more he wasn't repeating himself (like Waltz) or hamming it up against type (like Leo), but finding fresh satiric inspiration in his longtime collaborators problematic epic.
07 Alden Ehrenreich, Hail Caesar (2016)
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: All but Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
A star-is-born moment and yet somehow it didn't take? Would that i t'were so simple to become a star with a performance about becoming a star that's this savvy and charismatic.
06 Lakeith Stanfield, Short Term 12
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: All but Cooper and Fassbender
Nearly everyone in this great indie went on to much bigger careers but we're so proud to have been in on all of them at the ground floor, particularly Lakeith Stanfield. This incredibly raw and wounded performance of a teenager about to enter the real world after growing up in the system, aimed straight for the heart but without the soggy weight of sentimentality.
05 Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life (2011)
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: All but Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Every once in a while Oscar voters notice the well worn soulfullness just milimieters below the surface of that perfect movie star face. But they should do that more often.
04 James Franco, Spring Breakers
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: All but Cooper and Fassbender
Though his worst impulses have long since caught up with him, we shouldn't rewrite history and pretend he was never inspired. "Look at mah shiit!"
03 Ralph Fiennes, A Bigger Splash (2016)
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: ALL
Fiennes is in that special small category of actors that is hampered by being brilliant too frequently. It's obviously taken for granted by Hollywood rather than celebrated. That he only has two Oscar nominations is an outright embarrassment (for the Academy not for him) when he should have already won twice (Grand Budapest Hotel and Schindler's List). In A Bigger Splash he played against type, subverting his usual restraint for a balls out charisma/exasperation of a man who is always "on"
02 Michael Fassbender, Prometheus (2012)
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: ALL
Where can we buy a David8 model? No price is too high.
01 Matthew McConaughey, Magic Mike (2012)
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: ALL
His all time greatest performance and so easily awardable, too, in all the traditional ways. But for the ass-shaking and selfsploitation, that is. If only the Academy hadn't been so stuffy, nominating five men who'd already won, all doing less than career best (though Tommy Lee Jones was fab). McConaughey won the Oscar the very next year so we just pretend it was for this incredible star turn instead.
See any patterns here? What made these performances so tough for voters to see the worth in?