Best Supporting Actor - Strongest Lineup in Years?

by Nathaniel R

Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in THE APPRENTICE © Briarcliff Entertainment

It's that time when you should start voting on the chart polls of "who SHOULD win?" We all know Kieran Culkin has the "supporting" Oscar locked up for his moody insightfulness and purposefully too-much lead performance in A Real Pain. But can we pause for a moment to appreciate that, Category Fraud aside, this is the best Best Supporting Actor lineup we've had in ages. There's not a bad or solid-but-unexciting performance in the bunch, just excellence across the board. Because I was so stunned at the quality of the shortlist, I had to look back through Oscar history to find its equivalent  - a year wherein there's not a single performance nominated that would look bad as a winner. I think you have to go back thirty years to either 1995 or 1993 to find a lineup as consistently strong. This message has been brought to you by a post-nomination viewing of The Apprentice a film I'd been avoiding for trauma reasons around the death of democracy. Strong is just excellent in the awards magnet role of Roy Cohn, a role that's already won Al Pacino an Emmy and Nathan Lane a Tony (both via Angels in America). Strong is so good that it's legitimately surprising that he's not even third best in the category...

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Gold-Standard Roles: From Tony to Oscar

by Cláudio Alves

This season, Wicked hopes to translate some of its Tony glory to the Oscars, twenty years after the musical competed for Broadway’s highest honors. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, in particular, are now part of a long tradition of performers who took Tony-heralded parts and made them into Oscar success stories. Time will tell if either of them finishes the season with little golden men clasped tightly in their hands. Still, it’s already possible to contextualize them within this peculiar dynamic, this Tony-to-Oscar pipeline. Because we love lists and statistics here at The Film Experience, let’s recall every case when a Tony-nominated role earned itself AMPAS’ seal of approval…

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Team Experience Oscar Prediction: Final Scores

by Cláudio Alves

No one predicted I'M STILL HERE in Best Picture. | © Sony Pictures Classics

We're still reeling from this morning's Oscar nominations announcement but it's time to check predictions and assess the numbers. Like last year, various members of the Team Experience put forward their best guesses. While the point of this exercise is to see how different folks see the race, it's also a little competition of sorts, with a pundit ranking at the end. Overall, our collection of writers did better than last year, averaging a 75% success rate when excluding those tricky short film categories. These predictions also help us grasp what the day's big surprises truly were, both in terms of shocking selections or notorious snubs. Without further ado, here's the final score…

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Some Positive Thoughts on Our Oscar Nominees...

by Eric Blume

EMILIA PÉREZ | © Netflix

Each Oscar nomination morning, there’s always that moment of sadness or anger over our favorites being left out of the race.  It’s part of the fun of the awards season really…righteous indignation feels damn good!  And I’m sure, for all of you, this year was no exception.  There’s always something to gripe about on how the Academy did someone dirty, or how they’re sheep about following the trends, etc.

BUT, let’s have some fun and look at some of the positive things about this year’s nominees…

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A few thoughts on the Oscar nominations...

by Nathaniel R

Nominations have been announced for the 97th Academy Awards and our worst fears are realized: we’ll now be forced to watch a movie about T**** just as he’s in the process of dismantling democracy. The Apprentice scored two acting nominations. Though Sebastian Stan hadn’t been winning awards for this movie but the other one (A Different Man, in which he is brilliant), never doubt the power of a famous actor playing a famous person. Unless that person is Angelina Jolie I guess? She famously missed the category in 2008 for a biopic despite doing well in the precursors and now she’s missed again for Maria. 

Our other worst nightmare for this season is also true: Problematic messy Emilia Perez has obliterated the record set by infinitely better movies Roma and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon to become the most nominated non-English language film of all time at the Oscars. In fact, with 13 nominations it’s one of the most nominated movies of any kind. We are living in wild times...

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