Oscar Index: Jennifer Lawrence Is The Best Actress To Beat
Best Supporting Actor
Oscar night’s tightest race now appears to be tilting irrevocably Tommy Lee Jones’ way in the wake of his SAG Awards win. Recent history is on his side: the SAG supporting actor winner has gone on to win the Academy Award in each of the last five years. “Jones is blessed with one knockout scene after another, as well as Lincoln's strongest, twistiest, most affecting character arc,” Kyle Buchanan writes. “We expect him to win.” A Lincoln juggernaut, which is becoming less likely as the Oscar campaign season winds down, would have made him an absolute lock. Then again, like Meryl Streep, who won last year for The Iron Lady after a 29-year dry spell, Robert De Niro long overdue. He last won a Best Actor Academy Award in 1981 for Raging Bull.
1. Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln)
2. Robert DeNiro (Silver Linings Playbook)
3. Alan Arkin (Argo)
4. Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained)
5. Phillip Seymour Hoffman (The Master)
Best Supporting Actress
Like her Best Actress counterpart, Anne Hathaway improved immeasurably on the blunt object that was her Golden Globes acceptance speech at the SAG Awards. She seems poised to deliver a doozy on Oscar night. She was looser and funnier and did the requisite sincere sucking up to the Academy’s largest voting bloc: “I got my SAG card when I was 14. It felt like the beginning of the world. I have loved every single minute of my life as an actor.” (Even Valentine’s Day?). If there is any hope for Sally Field, it is the contagion that is what Kevin Fallon calls the “Hathahaters.” Blog snark is probably pretty much harmless, but a clever and spot-on new video parody of Anne’s “I Dreamed a Dream” showstopper has gone viral. But Hathaway can probably rest easy. Fallon quotes Fandango’s Dave Karger as saying that, polarizing as she Hathaway may be, she is so commandingly the frontrunner that “I don’t know what she’d have to do to screw up her chances.”
1. Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables)
2. Sally Field (Lincoln)
3. Helen Hunt (The Sessions)
4. Amy Adams (The Master)
5. Jacki Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook)
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