'It's not redundant to still be handing out awards after the Oscars as long as the awards themselves aren't the same!' This is what I tell myself as I wrap up the Film Bitch Awards two weeks later than is proper! There's just 3 categories to go now (so we'll be done this week) before we can hold the world's fastest awards ceremony. It involves a behind-the-scenes slapping of gold, silver, and bronze visual designations onto three of the nominees in each category.
Today, we're talking about the men...
Though it was a banner year for female performance, the men weren't half as impressive in 2018. Well, the leading men at least. Supporting actor worthies were everywhere one looked (which made mainstream awards season terribly disappointing for its lack of imagination!). As is tradition, I only allow 12 names for each category (among the nominees, finalists, and semi-finalists) and it was difficult to decide where the supporting men were concerned. If only all 12 could be nominees. Because the 12 supporting performances were so strong, a shout out to all of them, listed here in alpha order. Listed after their names are the honors they received so you can see how sparse the actual spreading of the wealth is despite their being about 50 awards groups now, the number of prizes jumps closer to 100 if you count all the foreign awards and festival honors and specialty organizations, too.
- Raúl Castillo as "Paps" in We the Animals (Spirit nomination + 1 critics group citation)
- Russell Crowe as "Marshall Eammons" in Boy Erased (AACTA nomination only)
- Colman Domingo as "Joseph Rivers" in If Beale Street Could Talk (nothing at all)
- Sam Elliott as "Bobby Maine" in A Star is Born (OSCAR NOMINATION + many more)
- Robert Forster as "Bert" in What They Had (AARP nomination only)
- Hugh Grant as "Phoenix Buchanan" in Paddington 2 (BAFTA nod + 10 critics awards citations)
- Richard E Grant as "Jack Hock" in Can You Ever Forgive Me? (OSCAR NOMINATION + many more)
- Russell Hornsby as "Maverick Carter" in The Hate U Give (7 critics group citations)
- Nicholas Hoult as "Harley" in The Favourite (nothing at all)
- Michael B Jordan as "Erik Killmonger" in Black Panther (BET, Critics Choice, Saturn, MTV Movie Awards, Teen Choice, Santa Barbara Vanguard Award + 22 critics citations)
- Alex Wolff as "Peter" in Hereditary (1 horror specific group + 4 critics citations)
- Steven Yeun as "Ben" in Burning (3 foreign citations, Santa Barbara Virtuoso Award, LAFCA, NSFC, + 11 critics citations)
Supporting Actor is regularly the category in which my own taste and Oscars diverge most. The Film Bitch nominations and Oscars are almost always 1/5 in this category... though this year it's a smidge more aligned with Sam Elliott and Richard E Grant nominated in both places. The most correlation this decade was 2014 and 2010 -- in both years there was a 3/5 match which is unusual)
Okay enough blabber, check it out:
BEST ACTOR & BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR NOMINATIONS
P.S. We make a big stink about "category fraud" here every year which obscures the fact that we aren't always rigidly furious about this topic. There are a few borderline cases nearly every year where either 'lead' or 'support' is totally defensible and in those cases we don't care at all how an actor is campaigned. For instance I kept changing my mind about whether Alessandro Nivola (Disobedience) and Alex Wolff (Hereditary) were lead or supporting in their movies, and I finally went with Disobedience being a three lead film (like The Favourite) and Hereditary, after a rewatch, being a pure one-lead star vehicle (Toni Collette) but I wouldn't be fussed about other takes. The only reason I've become so rigidly activist about this is all the abuse that Hollywood heaps on supporting actors with their constant bald-face lying about movie stars not really being the stars of the movies they're headlining in order to get them easy citations in a category created to honor character actors. It's such an abuse of the very spirit of why the award was created! If it hadn't become so corrupted we probably wouldn't care about an errant questionable citation here and there. Carry on.