Smackdown '02: Meryl, Julianne, CZJ, Queen Latifah "and" Kathy Bates

The Supporting Actress Smackdown series picks an Oscar vintage and explores.

THE NOMINEES Today's topic: 2002 which featured the movies Adaptation, The Hours, About Schmidt, and Best Picture champ Chicago.  This very starry field of much-beloved actresses (all but one are now Oscar winners) deliver a juicy collection of characters: a horny mother-of-the-groom, a suicidal 50s housewife, an opportunistic prison warden, a fictionalized non-fiction writer, and a jazzbaby murderess.

THE PANEL  Here to talk about these 2002 divas and their movies are comedian/writer Joel Kim Booster, comedian/writer Matt Rogers, Variety's Artisan's editor Jazz Tangcay, Vox's critic-at-large Emily VanDerWerff, and lip sync assassin Ben Yahr. And, as ever, your host at The Film Experience, Nathaniel R. Let's begin...

2002
SUPPORTING ACTRESS SMACKDOWN + PODCAST  
The companion podcast can be downloaded at the bottom of this article or by visiting the iTunes page...

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In Lieu of the Supporting Actress Smackdown...

by Eric Blume

This too-short Oscar season has all of us firing on all cylinders here at The Film Experience, so sadly we can't engage in a full Supporting Actress Smackdown this week. (The series will return soon though)  In its absence, and to encourage hearing from all of you, Nathaniel has asked me to submit my personal Smackdown ballot and let the chips fall where they may...

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Fourth Timers: Brad, Kathy, Saoirse, Joaquin, and the Zeéeeee

Four days till Oscar.

This season brings us multiple four-timers. It's round quatro for a full 25% of our acting nominees: Brad Pitt, Renée Zellweger, Saoirse Ronan, Joaquin Phoenix, and Kathy Bates. They're all on their fourth nomination for acting (though Brad has additional nominations for producing).

Let’s rank their 20 nominated performances for fun after the jump, shall we? Yes, let's...

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Kathy Bates going lead for Richard Jewell!

Shortly after updating the Best Supporting Actress chart and placing Kathy Bates in the mix for Richard Jewell, one of our SAG Nominating Committee friends sent us this image.  SURPRISE. Kathy Bates is campaigning as a lead at SAG.

Longtime awards obsessives will already know this but for newbies to the intricacies of awards season you should know that SAG voters do not have a choice where they place actors. They can only vote on them in the categories for which they've officially been submitted by the studios (same with Emmy voters). Occassionally SAG and Oscar campaign tactics are different, studios changed their mind, or errors are made by administrative types so people nominated in lead at SAG occassionally go on to win supporting acting Oscars (Benicio del Toro in Traffic / Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind) or go from being a supporting nominee at SAG to a leading player with Oscar (Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider / Kate Winslet in The Reader).

How will this all shake out?

Major shakeups in the Best Supporting Actress race

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There's a ton of movement on the new Best Supporting Actress Oscar prediction chart. Laura Dern and Jennifer Lopez might be all locked up but that's for nominations, the win is still very much anyone's game. Florence Pugh has been gaining momentum with Little Women more heavily screening now and the fact that she takes a well worn familiar character and suddenly makes her freshly fascinating. The Academy would never touch MidSommar but enthusiasm for her leading performance there in critical quarters doesn't exactly hurt her prestige factor since she's still a relative lesser known in Hollywood. Meanwhile in the Oscar darling realms of voting, early screenings of Richard Jewell in Los Angeles have prompted suspicion that Kathy Bates might finally be back in an Oscar lineup (it's been 17 years since her comic turn in About Schmidt brought her her third and to date final nod). Perhaps we shouldn't have plopped her right into the lineup so soon but if we have misjudged we'll adjust next week after screening the picture. 

Also rising in the charts this time: 75 year-old newbie Zhao Shuzhen (The Farewell), Oscar winner Octavia Spencer (Luce), and fresh revelation Taylor Russell (Waves) who all netted important Spirit nominations this week.