by Nathaniel R
Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in THE APPRENTICE © Briarcliff Entertainment
It's that time when you should start voting on the chart polls of "who SHOULD win?" We all know Kieran Culkin has the "supporting" Oscar locked up for his moody insightfulness and purposefully too-much lead performance in A Real Pain. But can we pause for a moment to appreciate that, Category Fraud aside, this is the best Best Supporting Actor lineup we've had in ages. There's not a bad or solid-but-unexciting performance in the bunch, just excellence across the board. Because I was so stunned at the quality of the shortlist, I had to look back through Oscar history to find its equivalent - a year wherein there's not a single performance nominated that would look bad as a winner. I think you have to go back thirty years to either 1995 or 1993 to find a lineup as consistently strong. This message has been brought to you by a post-nomination viewing of The Apprentice a film I'd been avoiding for trauma reasons around the death of democracy. Strong is just excellent in the awards magnet role of Roy Cohn, a role that's already won Al Pacino an Emmy and Nathan Lane a Tony (both via Angels in America). Strong is so good that it's legitimately surprising that he's not even third best in the category...
The day after the nominations I met a friend at Julius (NYC's oldest gay bar) and just before I arrived a multi-table conversation with strangers had commenced in which everyone opined that Denzel Washington was robbed. But was he? It's hard to complain about this lineup no matter how much you loved Denzel's "are you not entertained" style showboating in Gladiator II, or Clarence Maclin's moving self-portrait in Sing Sing, or Adam Pearson's charm offensive in A Different Man, or the perpetually overlooked John Magaro's film carrying work in September 5 to name the four actors we assume came closest to crashing this party. Even Denzel probably knows it's fire. This won't match my lineup of course (since Culkin won't be eligible for "Supporting") but it'll come much MUCH closer than this category ever does. To prove the point here's how closely my ballot aligned with Oscars in this category in the past twelve years.
2023: 2/5
2022: 3/5
2021: 2/5
2020: 1/5
2019: 2/5... or you can say 3/5 if you're feeling generous. The actual supporting Oscar winner (Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) was nominated in lead at the film bitch awards so he was still accounted for.
2018: 2/5
2017: 1/5
2016: 1/5
2015: 1/5
2014: 3/5
2013: 2/5
2012: 1/5
Years in bold are the only times the winner aligned; You'll notice that there are no years in bold, LOL.
As per usual there is trivia and anecdotes on the charts. And as per usual as I was writing this I imagined a fusion of the entire shortlist into one Frankenstein Monster Supporting Actor. The stitched together creature would be a married 40something Scorpio actor from Boston with two kids. He's been working as a professional actor since 1990 and you probably recognize him from the HBO series Succession. Take a look at the chart and vote daily.