Javier Bardem, one of Spain’s premier actors and the recipient of a Best Actor Academy Award nomination in 2001 for Before Night Falls, won the 2007 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for No Country for Old Men. Some viewers of the movie might wonder why the actor with the largest role in terms of screen-time in the movie would be nominated in the supporting category rather than as a lead. Being put up for Best Supporting Actor is just a trick that producers have used since at least the time of All About Eve (1950), when Anne Baxter refused 20th Century-Fox’s attempt to put her in the Supporting Actress category to improve both her and Bette Davis’ chances of bringing home the Hollywood gold.
The winner of a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Razor’s Edge in 1947, Anne Baxter got her Best Actress nod, and drew enough votes away from Davis to deny the great movie diva her third Oscar. Thus, Bette in one of the all-time great screen performances was trumped by Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, whose performance seen now, almost 60 years later, can almost NOT be believed as Holliday is an eccentric personality, to say the least. (All About Eve was nominated for a record 14 Oscars, since equaled by James Cameron’s box office blockbuster Titanic, and won six, including a Best Supporting Actor nod for George Sanders.)
The great Rosalind Russell refused her studio Columbia’s offer to enter her in the Best Supporting Actress category for Picnic (1955) on the basis that she was a lead, not a supporting player. Three years later, she got nominated for Mame. Al Pacino was surprised when Paramount put him up for a Supporting Actor in the first Godfather (1972), when he had more screen time than did Marlon Brando, who was put in the lead category (and won). Paramount didn’t want a rerun of the Baxter scenario. It also hoped Pacino would win the Supporting Actor trophy, but he was beat by John Houseman. (The Godfather likely was split by Pacino with James Caan and Robert Duvall, both of whom were nominated as Supporting Actor. Pacino, a career leading man and star, and Duvall, a career character actor who occasionally enjoyed a character-lead part, would later win Best Actor Oscars, for Scent of a Woman and Tender Mercies, respectively.)
You have to want the Oscar, as Julie Christie found out this year. Christie had been going around Hollywood dissing the Academy Awards as being personally meaningless to her and as an over-hyped merchandising gimmick that had gotten way out of control in the 42 years since she won her Oscar for Darling back in the Swinging Sixties. She was on the campaign trail thumping the tub, she said, only to get recognition for Sarah Polley and her movie, Away From Her.
Not a good campaign strategy.
Leading players are so desperate for an Oscar and the recognition it brings that, unlike Rosalind Russell, they want to be listed in the supporting category as well as the lead category, preferably in the same year, an even that was once unusual but is now increasingly common. Thus, you have Jamie Fox’s ridiculous Supporting Actor nomination for Collateral in 2005 when HE WAS IN THE ENTIRE RUNNING TIME OF THE FILM but for one scene featuring Tom Cruise. It was a stunt to get him an Oscar nod, and it worked. The Academy should have been ashamed of itself.
In 1962, there was heavy criticism of the listing of Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland for consideration for Best Supporting Oscars for Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg as they were leads, not supporting players.(The two screen legends both were nominated, but lost in the West Side Story sweep that saw George Chakiris become an Oscar winner, set up to become one of the greatest sufferers of the “Oscar Curse.”) It was viewed as a stunt that effectively denied recognition to actual supporting actors, for whom the category was created belatedly in 1937 for the previous year’s performance, eight years after the first Oscars were awarded.
Now, this lead-in-a-supporting role stunt — which picked up steam with Jack Nicholson’s multiple post-One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Best Actor Oscar nods in the Supporting Actor category (including one win, for Terms of Endearment in 1984) — is the norm. Nicholson copped his first Best Supporting Actor nomination in 1970, for his star-making turn in Easy Rider (1969), then scored four Best Actor in a Leading Role nominations between 1971 and 1976, winning for Cuckoo’s Nest. in the Bicentennial Year. After that torrid pace of five nominations in seven years, Jack Nichilson then suffered through a six year dry spell, relieved by a Best Supporting Actor nod in 1982 for Reds (1981). That, and his Best Supporting Actor Oscar win two years later for Endearment put his legenday career back on track.
It was unusual at the time of his Reds nod for an actor of Jack Nicholson’s stature, an Oscar-winning superstar, to get a Supporting Actor nomination. The following year, his co-star in the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Jessica Lange, scored Oscar nominations in both the lead and supporting categories, for Frances and Tootsie, respectively. She took home the iron for the latter film, as Supporting Actress, beaten by the great Meryl Streep (herself a Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner) for the lead award. Jessica Lange later would win a Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar herself in 1995 for Blue Sky. After that, her second win in six tries, her career went into eclipse. (Double-winner Streep, the all-time Oscar champ in terms of nominations with 14, including three in the supporting category. She has never been nominated in both categories in the same year.)
This year, it was Cate Blanchett’s turn to turn the trick, forElizabeth: The Golden Age in the Best Actress category, and her turn as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There bringing her a Best Supporting Actress nomination. That this “anything goes” attitude that blurred the demarcation between lead and supporting players, allowing leads to poach supporting Oscars, developed in the Ronald Reagan years is hardly surprising.
The first actor to be nominated in both the lead and supporting categories in the same year was the great Irish character actor Barry Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was nominated as Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 1944 — FOR THE SAME ROLE, that of Father Fitzgibbon in Going My Way (1943). Barry Fitzgerald copped the Supporting Oscar but lost out as Best Actor to his co-star Bing Crosby. He is the only actor to receive a double nomination for the same role, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences immediately amended the rules to prevent this from reoccurring. (Fitzgerald won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor for Going My Way, and also the Golden Globe — but that was for Supporting Actor.)
Javier Bardem is a very fine actor and the sentiment of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences was that he should get an Oscar, but not for Best Actor. Best Actor/Actress trophies, like Best Picture and Director, are considered infinitely precious in a way a supporting award is not. Thespians like Nicole Kidman mount years-long if not career-long campaigns for the award, and will go on any number of television shows to bare their souls (and in Kidman’s case, enter any number of venues to bare her bod) to bring home the iron to use as a door stop. Bardem had gotten one Best Actor nod (considered an honor in and of itself, particularly for a “foreign” actor) in 2001 for Before Night Falls and should have been nominated for Mar Adento (The Sea Inside) in 2005 but was not.
Playing a psycho killer in an homage to a Sam Peckinpah picture does not naturally bring kudos in Hollywoodland. The Academy typically doesn’t like to reward performances in “genre” pictures (Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington’s Best Actor wins in The French Connection and Training Day, respectively, are exceptions), so entering Bardem as Best Actor was out. Entering him as Best Supporting Actor was the shrewd move, as it guaranteed him a nod if not, as his sweep of all the awards seemed to foretell, the Oscar.
The Academy Awards are intensely political, and this political campaign — unlike Christie’s — was brilliantly waged. Bardem got his “make up” Oscar, (for Night Falls & Sea, when he probably should have taken home the Best Actor trophy), and the Academy got to recognize a brilliant actor, albeit in the lesser category.
Now, what will the Academy do about Mathieu Amalric, who was “robbed” — as was Bardem for “Sea” — of recognition for what might have been the best performance by any actor in the year 2007, in Le Scaphandre et le papillon? Does he have a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in his future?
Reference:
- Internet Movie Database Entry www.imdb.com/name/nm0000849/
