Best Actor & Best Actress. Vote on the Trivia-Filled Charts

by Nathaniel R

Lead acting nominees ranked by how many Best Picture nominees they've starred in.

We continue to expand the Oscar charts so we're hope you're enjoying them. All four acting charts are now complete, with Best Actress and Best Actor both newly updated with lots of trivia, theories on how the actors were nominated and more. Just like how we did with Supporting Actress and Supporting Actor. Don't forget you can vote each day on who should win. But for the here and now, here's some trivia in relation to all four acting categories combined:

BY THE NUMBERS
64 = average gross (in millions) of their nominated movies (box office numbers via a couple of days ago)
52 = number of Oscar nominations between them
47 = the average age of this year's nominees 
33 = average number of films they've appeared in
18 = number of children they have among them
9 = number of Emmys won by this group (Close x 3, King x 3, McCarthy x 2, and Malek)
5 = number of Oscars won by this group (Ali, Bale, Rockwell, Stone, and Weisz)
3 = number of Tonys won by this group (Glenn Close only)
2.6 = average number of Best Picture nominees that they've each starred in*
2.4 = the average number of Oscar nominations (in acting) for this year's nominees
2 = number of the nominees married to other famous actors (Elliott & Weisz)
2 = number of nominees who have played Meryl Streep's immediate family on film (Olivia Colman was her daughter in Iron Lady, and Glenn Close her mother in Evening... albeit in flashbacks with Mamie Gummer as the young Meryl)

PERCENTAGES
35% of the nominated characters are LGBTQ people
35% of the nominees were born outside the US (Adams, Aparicio, Bale, Colman, de Tavira, Grant, Weisz)
35% have also been Emmy nominees (Ali, Close, Driver, Elliott, King, Malek, McCarthy)
35% have also been Emmy nominees (Ali, Close, Driver, Elliott, King, Malek, McCarthy)
30% of the nominees are Water signs (3 Scorpios, 2 Pisces, and 1 Cancer) 
25% are former Oscar winners
25% of the characters nominated are politicians of some sort, professionally or in practice
25% of the characters nominated are musicians or employed in the music industry
20% of the nominated actors have performed on Broadway (Close, Cooper, Stone, Weisz)
20% of the nominated characters are dying or dead by the credit scrawl of these pictures.
20% are former Emmy winners
10% are former Tony nominees (Close & Cooper)
0% of the actors nominated are LGBTQ ...
(but Lady Gaga is mother monster so maybe she counts a little?)

RANDOMNESS
There are no Geminis nominated! It's the only sign not nominated and as a Gemini, we object!

* Those figures are much higher than they used to be pre 2009 when the Best Picture field expanded. It used to be uncommon to have lots of Best Picture nominees on your resume which makes Willem Dafoe's record particularly impressive. He's appeared in the most Best Picture nominees of this group of 20 actors, SIX in total, and yet only one of them (The Grand Budapest Hotel) happened in the current expanded Best Picture era. 

Sundance: Julianne Moore in the American remake of "After the Wedding"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from Sundance

Danish director Susanne Bier won an Oscar for her incredible film In a Better World (2010), her second time contending for Best Foreign Language Film. The first was her equally involving and magnetic After the Wedding (2006). That earlier film is actually one of two popular foreign hits remade for US audiences with Julianne Moore in the lead role this year (recent Oscar winner Sebastián Lelio remade his own 2013 Chilean film Gloria as Gloria Bell, due in March this year). Taking over Bier’s duties on this other do-over is Moore’s husband Bart Freundlich, whose last film was the underrated 2016 Tribeca entry Wolves. In addition to bringing this story back on the screen, this is a reunion for the real-life couple with leading man Billy Crudup after the three of them collaborated on both World Traveler (2001) and Trust the Man (2005).

What’s most changed – of surprisingly few modifications overall – from the Danish original to the 2019 remake that premiered at Sundance are the genders...

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Final Predictions: Best Actor & Best Actress

Other than the shorts, which we'll get to this weekend, we're all finished with our final Oscar predictions. Though we're at the top two most discussed categories, I regret to inform that this will surely be anti-climactic since I'm sticking with previous predictions in both cases. But here's why...

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FYC: Nicole Kidman in "Destroyer"

Eric here, with a brief plea for Oscar consideration for a dark horse candidate for Best Actress:  Nicole Kidman for Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer. For harmony in numbers, here’s five reasons why Nicole should be one of our final five when nominations are announced next Tuesday...

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Interview: Toni Colette on horror, grief, and her prismatic performances

by Nathaniel R

Toni Collette gives one of the year's great performances staring into the abyss of her own life in "Hereditary"Toni Collette doesn't like horror movies. We relate but there are exceptions: horror films starring Toni Collette are events. Her resistance to the genre,  she refers to both of her biggest horror hits as "classic dramas", may be the strange key to why she's so superb in them, grounding them in emotional truths while simultaneously having the kind of stylistic range as an actor that can lift right off with them into otherworldly places. 

We recently sat down after an encore screening and lively Q&A of Hereditary. Her sole Oscar nomination came early in her career as the grieving mother of little Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense (1999) and in a way, twenty years later, she's bookended that great early success with another very different grieving mother. This one's much harder to love but the performance is even better. Even if you don't love horror movies, it's impossible to miss the fact that her Annie, a self-indulgent artist and resentful mother, is a tour de force performance from an actress at the top of her game. Annie's life is traumas stacking up on traumas but Toni's performance keeps stacking brilliance upon brilliance.

Though she's played her share of narcissists or flighty women, the actress herself comes across as generous and grounded, thrilled by the collaboration of filmmaking. She rolls her eyes about herself and other actors if anyone gets too precious or self-involved about the craft. Though she loves acting dearly, she hilariously refers to it as her "day job" as we're making small talk before the interview.

In a rare turnabout, as we sat down, Toni asked the first question. So we'll begin right there....

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