It is in this year’s best supporting actor race, for which the word “race” is hardly fitting: four top-form actors have award-worthy work to offer, but one of them has had this whole thing licked for the better part of a year.
The award goes to JK Simmons
You need quite a performance up your sleeve to beat that field, and “quite a performance” is the term for JK Simmons’s fearsome, pulverising turn as a sadistic music teacher in Whiplash.
An instantly imitable anti-villain character, complete with his own pithy catchphrase (“Yo, Whiplash!”), Simmons has captured the popular and critical imagination in a similar fashion to Mo’Nique’s Oscar-winning demon mother in Precious. And no one can begrudge this deadpan comedy specialist his day in the sun.
The kind of character actor who viewers can recognise but not necessarily name, Simmons couldn’t have counted on winning almost every critics’ award and precursor prize in sight. The Oscar, at this point, is a merely formality.
Lifetime Oscar nominations:1
His other Whiplash wins: Golden Globes, Bafta, Screen Actors Guild Award
Meet the nominees
Robert Duvall
A near-annual slot is reserved in this category for an esteemed veteran who has done a film the great service of showing up, usually to scowl in an ornery fashion before expiring wheezily on screen.
In this regard, Robert Duvall’s work in the title role of The Judge is a textbook slot-filler; certainly, no other branch of the Academy thought the film merited their attention.
But Duvall, an Oscar winner and seven-time nominee, is 84-years-old (for trivia hounds, that makes him the oldest man ever nominated for an acting Oscar), and working less frequently in roles even of this marginal calibre. Consider this a hat tip to a remarkable career, if not a remarkable performance.
Lifetime Oscar nominations: 7
His other The Judge wins: Nominated for Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award
Mark Ruffalo
“Taken for granted” might be pushing it for an actor who has two Oscar nominations so far, but Ruffalo, the hard-working everyman, still gets less credit than he deserves for routinely pulling off complex characterisations with such disarming subtlety.
He’s quietly marvellous as doomed Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz in Foxcatcher, often serving as the decent, empathetic go-between for the more technically imposing performances of Steve Carell (nominated for best actor) and Channing Tatum (somewhat unfairly left out).
It’s the kind of low-key work that often goes unrecognised by awards bodies, and given that the Academy evidently admired Bennett Miller’s icy film more than they liked it — Foxcatcher has five nods but no best picture bid — the nomination seems like a win here.
Lifetime Oscar nominations: 2
His other Foxcatcher wins: Nominated for Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Bafta
Edward Norton
Birdman got a fresh gust of wind beneath its wings over the weekend: after winning both a Producers’ Guild award and the Screen Actors Guild ensemble prize, its odds for best picture have shortened considerably. No amount of momentum for the film, however, is going to lift out of the bridesmaid position, even if he’s arguably its most exciting element.
Wickedly parodying himself as an egotistical method actor who is at once galvanising and destroying the Broadway vanity project of Michael Keaton’s protagonist, Norton is evidently having a ball with his athletic nesting of a performance within a performance within a performance.
Even if the film abruptly drops him in its second half, this is the kind of bravura turn that would be a front-runner in most years — particularly with Norton on his third nomination and due for a win. Yet his award from the National Board of Review looks set to remain his biggest trophy of the season, as an even brasher performance that announced itself in Sundance last January cruises to victory.
Lifetime Oscar nominations: 3
His other Birdman wins: Nominated for Golden Globes, Bafta, Screen Actors Guild Award
Ethan Hawke
Ethan Hawke’s wry performance as a gradually reformed deadbeat dad in Boyhood took far longer than Birdman to establish itself as an awards player. It’s one of the greater injustices of awards season that Patricia Arquette has taken statuette after statuette for her 12-year-long role in Richard Linklater’s indie phenomenon, while Hawke has yet to claim a single win.
He crushes the heart without a single grandstanding scene, and delivers what might be the best acting work of his career. It could also be the apotheosis of his long-term collaboration with Linklater, a relationship that has secured him two writing nominations, for Before Sunset and Before Midnight. Not that Hawke, ever the genial dude on both sides of the screen, seems to care a whit.
Lifetime Oscar nominations: 4
His other Boyhood wins: Nominated for Golden Globes, Bafta, Screen Actors Guild Award
