The Toughest Emmy Quandary: Supporting Actress in a Drama Series?

We begin an Emmy FYC series tomorrow (Daily at Noon) since voting commences this month for nominations for the 67th Annual Emmy Awards. Emmy rules allow for 6 acting nominees per category. Though I shudder when any pundit suggests expanding lineups in any awards show -- it reduces the meaning if it's easy to get nominated -- if there were ever a convincing argument against honoring twice as many actors as usual, isn't it the 2015 Supporting Actress in a Drama Series field? 

THE FACTS
For the past three years the category has been almost exclusively dominated by five women. The 2012, 2013 and 2014 seasons saw a nominated shortlist that always included Christine Baranski (5 nominations for The Good Wife, 7 previous nominations with 1 win), Christina Hendricks (Mad Men, 5 nominations), Maggie Smith (4 nominations and 2 wins for Downton Abbey, 4 previous nominations with another win) and Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad, 3 nominations and 2 wins). Joanna Froggatt (Downton Abbey, 2 nominations) was usually in the lineup as well leaving very little wiggle room for other fine actresses. Essentially voters had one free spot each year that they were then quite fickle with. All but one of these five women are still eligible (Breaking Bad is finally off the air) which begs the question of how Emmy will deal with so many new and valuable players from freshman series or players who've been coalescing fans and momentum towards nominations without quite breaking in for other series.

Unless Emmy is willing to ditch one of their four beloveds (and it better not be Hendricks who had such a great sendoff in Mad Men and has been robbed in the past) there's only room for two newbies or returning players and there are a couple dozen of them (at least) to consider after the jump...

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Open Thread. What did I miss?

THE LEFTOVERS just gets better and better. how phenomenal is Ann Dowd any way?It occurred to me yesterday while making an exceedingly poor attempt to fully recuperate from TIFF madness (I should have been resting my strained eyeballs but instead I was emptying the DVR) that I had missed two whole weeks of regular news. I joked about this on twitter but I'm 150% sure that I missed something I'd actually like to have known about!

It's easy to miss things, even if you're fully immersed in the industry. (An example: I was talking to Felicity Jones at that Theory of Everything party about her scenes with Charlie Cox, who is so sweetly crush-worthy in the movie, and she somehow hadn't heard that he was the new Daredevil for Netflix!)

What movie things, besides TIFF and the standard Oscar buzz, have been on your mind these past couple of weeks?

Catch me back up. Fill me in.

Podcast Unchained: Top Ten Sneaks, Actresses of Color, Movie Gifts

Part 1 of 2
For this megamix conversation -- still shorter than most of the Best Picture Hopefuls! -- which is the last before the Oscar Nominations we ignored the act of "predicting" beyond a couple hazy hunches and dug into Quentin Tarantino's new slavesploitation western (which none of us like as much as the internet does as it so happens). But since this is the Film Experience we do love to meander through movie memories and Oscar digressions, Django Unchained is hardly the only film we visit in this 44 minute podcast. [With Nathaniel, Nick, Katey, and Joe.]

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Last minute Oscar hunches: Eddie Redmayne? Michael Haneke?
• Django Unchained
• Ann Dowd's self-funded Oscar campaign for Compliance
• Nathaniel's special Christmas Gift
• 1947 & 1991 Oscar Winner Flashbacks: Loretta Young and Mercedes Ruehl, anyone?
• Middle Of Nowhere's transfixing Emayatzy Corinealdi
• The power and powerlessness of physical beauty 
• Podcast Bingo

You can download the podcast on iTunes or listen right here at the bottom of the post. Join in the conversation by commenting! Did you get any movie related Christmas gifts? What's #6 on your (current) top ten list? 

Django Unchained, Top Ten Sneak Peeks

National Link Registry

The Hollywood Reporter  A former sitcom writer "kvells and kvetches" about The Guilt Trip and Parental Guidance starring Babs and Bette
PopWatch Mark Harris on Hollywood's love of gun violence. I highly recommend reading this but I highly caution NOT reading the comments because as per usual the gun crazies come out. They'd have us all packing and I so don't want to live in their preferred world.
Cinema Blend Katey & Eric on 12 Unfairly Overlooked Movies of 2012 from Hello I Must Be Going (Yay, Melanie!) through Cosmopolis

Awards Daily Whoa. Ann Dowd is footing the bill for her own Oscar campaign.
The Hollywood Reporter talks to Emayatzy Corinealdi on her breakthrough in Middle of Nowhere. You know. I've been trying not to talk about this because I can't figure out a way to say it that doesn't sound indelicate but in some ways I really hate falling in love with new black actresses in the same way that falling hard for new theater actors can be nerve-wracking. Chances are (unforgivably) strong that no one will give these gifted performers another plum opportunity after their breakthrough and that truly sucks. So I'm crossing my fingers for Corinealdi but I'm still waiting for something real to happen for Pariah star Adepero Oduye, last year's breakthrough actress of color. And I'm still trying to wrap my head around the non-career of the brilliant Kimberly Elise so... 

The Carpetbagger on screenwriter Lucy Alibar's (Beasts of the Southern Wild) crash course in cinema
The Onion "Top Movies of 2012"
David Poland gives himself a new nickname. Or adopts one given.
Vanity Fair Barbra Streisand talks about her legendary duet with Judy Garland in the 60s. Really interesting comment from Babs I think.  
MNPP joins the Zero Dark Thirty fan club 

Oooh, look Quentin Tarantino pays tribute to Pedro Almodóvar saying that his filmography is "the one to beat" -damn straight! Nobody else in the modern era compares.

Finally, I want to extend my annual congratulations to the 25 films that are newly announced for preservation by the National Film Registry. They are:

• "3:10 to Yuma" (1957)
• "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959)
• "The Augustas" (1930s-1950s)
• "Born Yesterday" (1950)
• "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" (1961)
• "A Christmas Story" (1983)
• "The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Title Fight" (1897)
• "Dirty Harry" (1971)
• "Hours for Jerome: Parts 1 and 2" (1980-82)
• "The Kidnappers Foil" (1930s-1950s)
• "Kodachrome Color Motion Picture Tests" (1922)
• "A League of Their Own" (1992)
• "The Matrix" (1999)
• "The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair" (1939)
• "One Survivor Remembers" (1995)
• "Parable" (1964)
• "Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia" (1990)
• "Slacker" (1991)
• "Sons of the Desert" (1933)
• "The Spook Who Sat by the Door" (1973)
• "They Call It Pro Football" (1967)
• "The Times of Harvey Milk" (1984)
• "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971)
• "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1914)
• "The Wishing Ring; An Idyll of Old England" (1914)

As per usual that's a lot of titles that I know nothing about but I'm most thrilled by The Times of Harvey Milk which is one of the most moving and important documentaries ever made. And on a sillier note, can we talk about how ever-watchable the female baseball comedy A League of Their Own is? Sometimes I pine for the 1990s. It's tough to imagine that movie breaking $100 million now but the 90s were a good time for girlpower narratives.  

If you're a fan of A League of  Their Own (who isn't?) I want to know which scene just popped into your mind when you heard that it made the list!

Interview: Ann Dowd on "Compliance" and Oscar Buzz

Ann Dowd loves the word "delicious". She describes her children this way and actors she admires, too ("Annette Bening! She's delicious and such a good actress"). And what word could possibly be a better fit to fully convey the joy of this moment in her career?

When the tiny indie Compliance debuted to surprisingly robust critical conversation this past August, Ann Dowd won the kind of reviews that Oscar dreams are made of... even from critics who didn't like the film. Her superbly layered work as "Sandra", the prickly overwhelmed fast food manager at the center of the ethically disturbing drama lingers in the memory. Proof of that is a recent well deserved nomination at the Spirit Awards. I spoke to her a few hours after the announcement of her biggest prize yet, The Best Supporting Actress Award from the National Board of Review.

NATHANIEL: Congratulations on winning the NBR Prize!

ANN DOWD: Thank you so much. I have to say I'm beside myself. Really happy.

Have you seen Ann Dowd's riveting work in Compliance yet?

NATHANIEL: Does all of this attention feel like "It's about time!"?

[Oscar buzz, Freaks and Geeks, and red carpet panic after the jump...]

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