He wasn’t considered a serious contender, certainly not opposite performers like The Truman Show’s Ed Harris (who’d won the Golden Globe) and A Civil Action’s Robert Duvall (who’d won the SAG). Coburn was a Hollywood veteran, yes, but known for playing heavies in action movies and Westerns, and he was barely a presence in that year’s awards conversation until a surprise SAG nomination. The subject matter (a small-town sheriff dealing with an unsolved crime and dark family secrets) was grim, and the studio (Lionsgate) was barely a year old and had another, more Oscar-friendly contender in its stable in Gods and Monsters. Paul Schrader’s Affliction had a hard enough time fighting for Nick Nolte’s performance in the Best Actor race in 1998. Presumed Favorite: Ed Harris, The Truman Show Best Supporting Actor, 71st Academy Awards Lucky for us, she won in a shocker and then proceeded to deliver an acceptance speech that referenced co-star George Clooney’s rubber bat-nipples, so in a way, we all won.Ĩ. For another, Swinton was still seen largely as a Hollywood outsider, having come up through the films of Derek Jarman and Sally Potter. For one thing, neither Dee nor Ryan were nominated in that BAFTA category, and Brits winning the BAFTA never seems all that surprising. And 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan, enjoying her breakthrough nomination as a meddlesome little girl in Atonement, hadn’t won any major precursors but was potentially next in a long line of child actresses like Tatum O’Neal and Anna Paquin to win the Oscar.įew were betting on Tilda Swinton to win for her performance as the nerve-jangled corporate attorney in Michael Clayton, not even after she won the BAFTA. Ruby Dee, in a small but impactful role as Denzel Washington’s mother in American Gangster, had won the SAG and seemed to have the strongest forward momentum going into Oscars Night. Cate Blanchett had won the Golden Globe that year (though that ceremony had been truncated into a press conference due to the WGA strike) for her flashy role as Bob Dylan in director Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. Nearly every nominated actress seemed to have a claim to the win: Amy Ryan had swept the major critics’ prizes for her turn as the drug-addicted, vulgar mother of a missing daughter in Gone Baby Gone.
The Best Supporting Actress race for the films of 2007 was one of the great wide-open races in recent memory. Presumed Favorites: Ruby Dee, American Gangster and Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There Best Supporting Actress, 80th Academy Awards Here they are, ranked in order of how unexpected each win was heading into the big day.ĩ.
Over the last 25 years, nine upsets in the Oscar acting categories have stood out as particularly stunning. And the most memorable ones are always in the acting categories, if for no other reason than it means we can watch all five nominees’ faces react to the news live. These upsets shock, disappoint, and exhilarate us, sometimes all at once. Sometimes the favorite to win loses out to, well, The Favourite. Sometimes a Hollywood legend loses out to an upstart whose acceptance speech is 70 percent stunned silence. Sometimes a steamroller of a performance gets nipped at the last second. Is there a more thrilling awards-season possibility than the Oscars upset? After weeks and months of insiders’ predictions and whispers that leave us feeling smug about who will triumph on Oscars Night, the last-minute upset is a necessary reminder that, at the end of the day, we don’t know a damn thing. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos: Fox Searchlight Pictures, Sony Pictures Classics, Warner Bros Pictures