Awards
Oscar 2020 Winner Predictions: Supporting Actor
Brad Pitt winning here will seem like the stars are lining up given what went down when he was first nominated in 1995.
We didn’t predict Anthony Hopkins to get nominated here, thinking that the Golden Globes’s enthusiasm for The Two Popes was a fluke. We were wrong, and he ended up becoming the elder statesman in an acting lineup that contains, on average, by far the oldest nominees. The person we predicted to get in instead, Marriage Story’s Alan Alda, is a year older than Hopkins, so we certainly weren’t betting the farm on any male ingénues.
On the other hand, it sure feels like spry 56-year-old Brad Pitt, who opened his acceptance speech at last night’s SAG Awards with a joke about having a Tinder profile, had this award in the bag the moment his Marlboro Man-ish handyman hopped atop his buddy’s roof to fix the antenna in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, whipping off his shirt to reveal a tawny, fully-abbed torso that scarcely seems to have aged in the nearly 30 years since he seduced the country in Thelma & Louise. He, as Leonardo DiCaprio’s co-lead, has a lot more to do throughout than just doff tees, but the “I’m still here” virility of that moment embodies the entire film’s love letter to old-guard masculinity in Tinseltown.
Not that anyone’s reading too deeply into it, not when there’s good old-fashioned awards numerology to fall back on. Within minutes of the nominations being announced, Oscar Twitter jumped on the fact that the best supporting actor slate this year is composed of acting winners from 1990 (Joe Pesci), 1991 (Anthony Hopkins), 1992 (Al Pacino), and 1993 and 1994 (Tom Hanks). Fewer pointed out that Pitt was also a nominee in 1995 for 12 Monkeys, losing out to the now-canceled Kevin Spacey. Which makes it seem all the more poetically like the stars are lining up when Pitt wins for a film whose finale proposes a rousing bit of alternate, corrective history in which the “good” guys obliterate the “bad” ones.
Will Win: Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
Could Win: Joe Pesci, The Irishman
Should Win: Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
- Features7 days ago
The Best Horror Movies on Hulu Right Now
- Features7 days ago
The 10 Best Electronic Albums of 2020
- Video7 days ago
Review: Béla Tarr’s Magnum Opus Sátántangó on Arbelos Films Blu-ray
- TV5 days ago
Review: Night Stalker Is a Cathartic but Structurally Rote True Crime Story
- Film7 days ago
Review: Film About a Father Who Walks Down a Recorded Memory Lane
- Film6 days ago
Review: Bloody Hell Is Ultimately a Grind, Despite a Spirited Ben O’Toole Turn
- Film7 days ago
Review: Some Kind of Heaven Keeps Its Subjects at a Frustrating Distance
- Film6 days ago
Review: Hunted Gets Stuck in a Holding Pattern As It Riffs on Fairy Tale Tropes