We begin our rundown of the major races, however, with a category that looks invulnerable to any late-breaking developments: one woman has effectively had best supporting actress on lock since the summer, and it’d take some pretty dedicated personal muckracking on the part of her rivals’ teams — we’re talking revelations of serial-killer activity, really — to wrest it away from her.
And the award goes to... Patricia Arquette
A well-liked industry workhorse whose decades of hard graft had hitherto met with little reward — give or take an Emmy for ropey psychic drama series Medium — Patricia Arquette now finds herself taking every gong in sight for her deft, disarming and finally heart-crushing work as a similarly long-suffering, taken-for-granted mother of two in Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s critically beloved time-lapse experiment and perceived Best Picture frontrunner. (On top of the Golden Globe and a wealth of critics’ group wins, the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association were sufficiently impressed to promote her to Best Actress.)
It’d be viewed as fine work under any circumstances, but the twelve-year arc of the production works in Arquette’s favour: not many actors get to literally age an entire decade before the eyes of their audience, and novelty coupled with expertise is a tough combination to beat.
Meet the nominees...
Meryl Streep
Who is she? Well, it’s certainly not Meryl Streep, who clocked up her 19th nomination for Into the Woods — bettering the record she’s held since 2003 as the most-nominated actor in Oscar history.
The glass-half-empty flip side of that distinction, of course, is that she’s lost more times than any other actor, often for pretty makeweight performances. Playing the calculating Witch in Rob Marshall’s slightly stilted film of Stephen Sondheim’s tricksily post-modern fairytale musical, Streep is in tune, in good spirits and caked in make-up — if it’s possible to flamboyantly phone in a performance, she’s nailed it.
Still, there’s little sport in handing prizes to amply rewarded actors for passing tests everyone already knew they could pass, and the Academy’s cool response to her film — its only other nominations are for costume and production design — doesn’t help her cause.
Laura Dern
If Streep’s nomination had a faintly musty odour of inevitability to it, the same couldn’t be said for Laura Dern’s mention for Wild — the biggest surprise among the acting nominations given her absence from the precursor award trail, bar a few nods from regional critics’ societies.
We’ll never doubt you again, Detroit — though with respect, the full-page trade-paper ads taken out by Dern’s mother, Oscar-nominated actress Diane Ladd, on her daughter’s behalf may have more to do with it.
It’s heartening to see one of America’s most reliably interesting character actresses back in the fold 23 years after nabbing her first nomination for Rambling Rose.
If only she had a little more to do in Wild: she’s warm, textured and tender-tough in her few scenes as the hardscrabble mother of Reese Witherspoon’s Cheryl Strayed, but it’s difficult to build a complete character in flashback. Let’s consider this the Academy’s overdue apology for ignoring her in Inland Empire and leave it there.
Keira Knightley
Another actress who has been made to wait a while (if not quite as long as Dern) for her second nomination. It’s been nine years since she was invited to the dance for Pride and Prejudice, since which time she’s taken on a range of baity-looking parts in polished prestige projects — Atonement, Never Let Me Go, Anna Karenina — that haven’t quite taken her the full distance.
It’s not that Knightley has particularly outdone herself in The Imitation Game: she’s bright, alert and slyly self-satirising as Bletchley Park codebreaker Joan Clarke (pictured below, far left), but still not half as nuanced and open-hearted as she was in Begin Again a few months before.
But she’s had a productive 2014, also appearing in Say When and (remember this one?) Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and is in a popular Best Picture contender — a neat formula for what industry folk refer to as a hard-earned “coattail nomination”. She still won’t win.
Emma Stone
And neither will Stone, who would be a significant threat to do so in most other years for her livewire turn as Michael Keaton’s ex-addict daughter in Birdman. Stone ticks a lot of Academy boxes.
They like rewarding young, eager ingenues in this category, particularly when they agree to look like hell on screen. They like rewarding predominantly comic actors for taking a darker dramatic turn, even if the degree of difficulty isn’t notably higher than in their comedy work. And they like loud, blazing monologues that can be easily excerpted for montage purposes.
Done, done and done: already a clip-reel mainstay, Stone’s hurricane-level showpiece scene in which she rails against Keaton for his manifold failings as a father, actor and human being could net her votes even from Academy members too lazy to watch the whole film.
