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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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. 

Willem Dafoe is Monumental in "At Eternity's Gate"

by Eric Blume

Willem Dafoe plays Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, director Julian Schnabel’s film about the last year in the life of the great Dutch painter.  And Dafoe’s delivers a magnificent performance here: his face is the canvas of the film, in all its agony and ecstasy.

Schnabel, a painter himself who made the stunning films Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, gives us a deeply detailed movie of a painter by a painter.  The mechanics of landscape and portrait painting, the walks to the viewpoints, the tools, and the intimacy with the subject all become the fabric of this movie.  Schnabel’s attention to these subtleties establish his credibility and give the movie real texture...

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Best Lead Actor - New Oscar Chart

by Nathaniel R

If current predictions hold we're looking at quite an exciting Best Actor shortlist: Bradley Cooper, Willem Dafoe, Ryan Gosling, Ethan Hawke, and Viggo Mortensen. They've all been nominated multiple times for their acting but have yet to win. Since they're all hugely talented, it's basically a win-win scenario on Oscar night no matter who wins, really!  At least that's how it feels at this current moment looking at the grid.

Of course it's only September and things could definitely change. Things could definitely change in the name of Christian Bale as Vice Dick Cheney. Check out the revised chart with new photos, new ranking, new text. Thoughts?

Willem Dafoe meets Julian Schnabel 'At Eternity's Gate'

by Murtada Elfadl

Willem Dafoe went 14 years between his first and second Oscar nominations, and 17 years between his second and third. But the star of Platoon (1986), Shadow of a Vampire (2000) and The Florida Project (2017) could immediately follow up that last nomination just a year later with his lead role as Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate...

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