April Foolish Predictions #4: Best Supporting Actor

Previously: Animated Features, Foreign Films, Sound & Music, Prediction Index

What will the Supporting Actor race look like this year? Will it be awash in "comebacks" (Al Pacino, John Lithgow, Tim Robbins, David Straithairn)? Perhaps it'll lean into fresh cinematic faces (Aldis Hodge, Jonathan Majors, Kristoffer Hivju, Taika Waititi)? Maybe it'll be a year of long-awaited first nominations for thespians who've had rich careers (Ben Mendelsohn, Bruce Willis, Jonathan Pryce, Antonio Banderas, Tracy Letts)? Most likely, as with each Oscar year before it, it'll be some random combo of all three but determining who the five men will be this early is nigh impossible. Why is that? Well, there are a few reasons...

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Will John Lithgow Triple Crown?

by Nathaniel R

John Lithgow to play Roger Ailes

I used to suspect that John Lithgow, who is quite an awards magnet, would join our growing Triple Crown Actors list. But then the big screen portion of his triple threaded career seemed to peter out, with less prominent roles and less frequent movies. This just in: he's been cast in that increasingly starry Fox News Scandal movie alongside Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, and Margot Robbie. He'll be playing the repulsive Roger Aisle, the main antagonist of the film. And you know how Oscar LOVES respected actors playing despicable men in the Supporting category. Perhaps he'll Triple Crown yet?

Lithgow was nominated for two consecutive Best Supporting Actor Oscars in the 1980s (The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment). Aside from that short round of movie hoopla he's mostly concentrated on racking up Emmys (12 noms, 5 wins to date) and Tonys (6 nominations, 2 wins to date).

What's your favorite performance from this 72 year-old showbiz giant?

The Furniture: Beatriz at Dinner in a Tacky Muted Mansion

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Beatriz at Dinner is a film of climaxes, moments of outrage that burst through the veneer of respectability cultivated by the rich and amoral. Beatriz (Salma Hayek), overwhelmed with disgust at a picture of Doug (John Lithgow) and the body of a recently-murdered rhinoceros, throws his phone at him and storms out. Laughing at her principles, he looks at his hosts and asks, “Does she get out much?”

This, of course, is a central irony of Miguel Arteta and Mike White’s tightly-wound send-up of American wealth. Doug is the CEO of Rife Worldwide, an internationally-reviled real estate firm. He’s a Trumpian nightmare of toxic masculinity and unbridled capitalism, breaking laws and displacing communities as a best business practice. And so when he asks this question, we are reminded that his life is spent constructing hideous monuments to tackiness that replicate a precise vision of high-end living no matter the context...

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Who will win or could win the SAG Awards?

Last year, the Screen Actors Guild Awards had a ready-made anti-Oscar narrative with a slate of winners that features colorful casts (Orange is the New Black) and Idris Elba as the supporting actor winner during the #OscarsSoWhite backlash. This year, there's no clear media narrative and SAG even has to make do without a Best Picture frontrunner since La La Land is understandably not up for their top prize (Outstanding Performance by a Cast... also referred to as "Best Ensemble" by many). So what will they choose this year? Who knows!

Viola has won four SAG awards, two for How to Get Away With Murder, two for The Help

We'll find out tomorrow night but what we're most looking forward to the lifetime achievement tribute to Lily Tomlin which will happily be presented by her 9 to 5 co-stars Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton. But back to predictions. Will Viola Davis win her fifth SAG in five years?  Let's make the tough calls after the jump...

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Miss Sloane If You're Nasty

by Jason Adams

True story: the other day I was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, down near the water and I looked around myself at the muddy yards of the warehouses and I suddenly had this vision of Jessica Chastain coming at me in that gorgeous white overcoat and Pfeiffer-wig that she wore in A Most Violent Year, waving her big gun, and instead of being scared I was elated -- that is, as I'm sure most of you are aware, how we actresssexuals roll. "Kill me if you must, but just be fabulous about it!"

Anyway I flashed back to that moment while watching the just-dropped trailer for Miss Sloane, Chastain's upcoming film about a gun lobbyists from director John Madden...

I am a simple man with simple pleasures and that cuts to the core of it. So Miss Sloane has a killer cast besides Miss Chastain - there's Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alison Pill, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mark Strong, Sam Waterston, Dylan Baker, Jake Lacy, and John Lithgow - and it's out on December 9th; will it be this year's Michael Clayton (nominations all over the place) or this year's Thank You For Smoking (notsomuch)?