Category Analysis: Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series

by Juan Carlos Ojano

With no recurring guest nominee present, this should have been an exciting crop. And yet, if I am being completely honest, it's hard to get excited. Two nominations for The Mandalorian but none for its best submission (Bill Burr)?  The best "guest actor" from The Crown was not even submitted (Tom Brooke). An Emmy favorite gets in for a show already cancelled by its network on its first season. Meanwhile, Don Cheadle gets in for a cameo in a Marvel series? These are the men in this year's crop of contenders for this category.

Without further ado, the nominees and their episode submissions…

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Podcast: All about "Mank" plus the Best Director Oscar race

with Nathaniel R & Murtada Elfadl

We're back!

Index (63 minutes)
00:01 Mank: The stars, the story, and rewatching Citizen Kane
24:00 MVPs of the ensemble. Plus those Norma Shearer asides
32:00 How will Oscar react overall? David Fincher's career acclaim
38:00 Everybody in the (wildly open) Best Director race. Plus female directors rising!
55:30 Mank in male acting categories: Gary Oldman? Charles Dance?

Related Reading:
• Best Actor Chart
• Best Director Oscar Chart

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

MANK

Months of Meryl: Plenty (1985)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

Charles Dance and Meryl Streep in "Plenty"

#11 — Susan Traherne, resistance fighter turned diplomat’s wife with a gnawing sense of unease about the life she must lead.

MATTHEW:  “I just wish she were more ordinary,” a persnickety commercial director grumbles about an offscreen model hired to play the mother in a promo for dog food. “Will the audience identify?” he frets. We’re in England in the postwar 1940s and Susan Traherne, a former agent in the French resistance, is rolling her eyes through a mind-numbing advertising job that she will promptly vacate. The scene is quick but Susan walks out just in time for the director’s comments to resonate as a sly statement on the woman herself, the reliably erratic anti-heroine played by Meryl Streep in Fred Schepisi’s tepid cinematic adaptation of David Hare’s Plenty. Will an audience identify with a figure so brazenly, even coldly unconventional? And does such identification even really matter...?

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17 Thoughts I Had While Watching "Woman in Gold"

Have you seen Woman in Gold which has been out on DVD for a bit now? It's about an old Austrian Jew (Helen Mirren) who immigrated to America during the Holocaust and attempts to get her family's original Gustav Klimt paintings back which were stolen by the Nazis and now "belong" to a museum in Austria.

Here are a dozen plus thoughts I had while watching it...

What do you know about art restitution?

• Nothing? It's okay. I didn't either. Helen Mirren will teach us. She speaks most of her lines as if to a small child. In fact, a lot of the characters do. They're constantly explaining the movie's plot and conflicts to us. And after explaining things there's sometimes bits of dialogue like...

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Westeros Comes to Hollywood: Casting News for Game of Thrones Actors

Margaret here to talk about Hollywood casting directors' collective infatuation with the actors on Game of Thrones. HBO's fantasy epic is a ratings juggernaut and has been Emmy-nominated a hundred times over. Its enormous cast (more series regulars than any other show on television) is getting a lot of attention, and many of them are landing high-profile movie roles. The prestige cable effect, so often noted for its ability to bring movie stars to TV, seems to be working in the other direction for Game of Thrones. 

Let's check in on the upcoming projects from our Westerosi friends: 

Carice van Houten

GoT Role: Melisandre, spooky red-headed priestess

Recently Booked: the Jesse Owens biopic Race. The Dutch actress will play legendary German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Aidan Gillen

GoT Role: Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish, slippery schemer.

Recently Booked: Recently greenlit sequel The Maze Runner Chapter II: The Scorch Trials. It's reported that he'll be playing the villain, Janson. 

Gwendoline Christie

GoT Role: Brienne of Tarth, lady warrior

Recently Booked: Star Wars: Episode VII. Her role is top-secret, but the movie is about as high-profile as they come. Her combat experience and 6'3" frame are likely to feature. She's also booked a small part in the final Hunger Games film, as a military commander.

More Westerosi movie news after the jump..

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