Commenting on the Best Supporting Actress debate following the recent Oscar announcements.
When the Oscar announcements happened last week, they (as usual) caused feelings of both elation and head shaking as cinephiles delighted in surprises such as the screenplay nod for Knives Out and the widespread acclaim for Parasite before noticing all the films and artists that were stupefyingly absent. The oversights this year however were just too jaw dropping to ignore. Virtually everything having to do with Us, The Farewell, Uncut Gems, Dolemite is My Name, Honey Boy and The Lighthouse (specifically Willem Dafoe’s terrifying performance) was nowhere to be found when the nominations were announced. Considering the high number of films this past year which garnered acceptance from both the critical media AND the general public, 2019 in Oscar history will not be a year cinephiles will look back on with pride.
There is one omission in particular which was especially surprising and yet not totally unexpected was Jennifer Lopez in the category of Best Supporting Actress for her magnetic turn in Hustlers. The film, a runaway hit, cast Lopez in a new light with nearly everyone who saw it agreeing that it was the performance of her career, reaching levels most other actresses rarely manage. Award after award followed as Lopez found herself in a presumed race to the Oscar stage alongside Marriage Story’s Laura Dern, her stiffest competition. There isn’t anyone who wasn’t curious to see which of the two front runner actresses would take home the gold. I myself had even planned an editorial spotlighting the characters they played. My aim was to look at how the actresses portrayed East Coast vs West Coast sensibilities and how their characters’ pasts had shaped their present lives as mothers with jaded toughness masking slight vulnerability. Sadly however, it wasn’t meant to be.
Lopez’s absence from the list of names nominated for Oscars this year has taken a sharp, and quite frankly, tacky turn. Almost immediately, film twitter began venting their frustrations over the Lopez snub by proclaiming that Kathy Bates (who was nominated for Richard Jewell) had swooped in and taken her place among the five final nominees. The fall out has been swift and pretty relentless as a flood of sympathy for Lopez has also contained a hefty amount of criticism towards Bates. While the anger over the whole situation is far from unfounded, it’s nonetheless misguided.
Everyone has a valid case for being upset with the Academy for failing to nominate Lopez. The thing is though, Bates also deserves to be there. The actress has been one of the most dependable actresses of her generation, conquering nearly every kind of medium and genre within the acting world. Still, Bates has never fully escaped being overlooked way too often for both parts and accolades. She was famously passed over in favor of Michelle Pfeiffer as the lead in Frankie & Johnny, despite having originated the role on the stage. When one interviewer reportedly commented years later to Bates: “You’re not exactly Michelle Pfeiffer,” the actress simply replied: “Well, she’s not me either.” As much as she works, it’s a crime that only Tyler Perry, Sam Mendes, Stephen Frears and Woody Allen have given her roles in the last decade or so that actually did something interesting and noteworthy with her talents on the big screen, while David E. Kelley, Chuck Lorre and Ryan Murphy gave her the kind of rich material to shine on the small one. With Richard Jewell, director Clint Eastwood has done right by the casting of Bates in the role of Bobbi Jewell, the mother of the security guard suspected of planning the Atlanta Olympics bombing in 1996. Her portrayal of the real-life woman is a heartbreaking one that’s fraught with anger, confusion and the agony of knowing that life will never be the same again.
When it comes to Lopez’s absence, the answer may be a little more clear cut. They say everyone’s past comes back to haunt them and that’s certainly true when it comes to Lopez’s diva-like persona which made her a household name. Lopez is first and foremost an actress and a more than capable one. Still though, her explosion onto the world scene in the early 2000s saw her trying to establish herself in every form of major entertainment from albums to fragrances as gossip columnists couldn’t stop writing about her personal life. An abundance in overexposure made the majority of her acting choices during this period (The Wedding Planner, Maid in Manhattan, Shall We Dance, Monster-in-Law) feel hollow and commodified as if they were made by committee with Lopez as the head. Even 2010’s The Back-Up-Plan showed that the actress couldn’t let go of the throwaway comedy niche which had given her so much. Lopez has never made any excuses for her career or public persona; and she shouldn’t. To see a Latina woman attain such a level of stardom and influence remains unquestionably significant. But there was always something of a lack of credibility between Lopez and her contemporaries, Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek, who have been more concerned with industry position rather than branding. The fact that those two women have four Oscar nominations and one win between them, all for films which weren’t really in the realm of manufactured star vehicle, says it all.
But the fact remains that Lopez deserved to have her name read that morning. The reason for this isn’t just because her work in Hustlers was a revelation so much as it was a confirmation of what she’s always been capable of. The actress was given a crash course early on in her career as she found herself in the worlds of Frances Ford Coppola, Bob Rafelson, Stephen Soderbergh and Oliver Stone. As she started to get noticed within the industry, Lopez immediately showed she was willing to take risks. Despite being a plum role, Selena is more of a daunting task than anything else; one which Lopez fearlessly conquered, while The Cell, although dismissed at the time, has been given a second life and is now praised as a cutting edge sci-fi thriller. Even as Lopez became more brand than actress, she still managed to sneak in worthwhile performances in vehicles which weren’t grandiose vanity projects. She held her own opposite Robert Redford in the somber drama An Unfinished Life, disappeared into her role as the wife of a Puerto Rican musician in El Cantante and starred as a real-life journalist investigating a series of unsolved murders in Bordertown. If critics didn’t like Lopez’s surprise 2018 hit Second Act, they couldn’t help but like her as virtually every review commented on how much the actress had evolved over the years in terms of her screen presence. The aptly-titled movie became further evidence of Lopez’s evolution as an actress in the eyes of the critical media as audiences still found themselves being won over by her.
With all the hoopla surrounding Lopez’s absence on the list of nominees, it’s easy to forget that there were some other front other Best Supporting Actress contenders who were left out. Annette Benning’s Golden Globe nod was deserved as she brought one of the strongest women in Washington to the screen in The Report, while Da’vine Joy Randolph proved to be such a revelation in Dolemite, she actually stole focus away from star Eddie Murphy. Nicole Kidman’s journey as Gretchen Carlson carried far more weight than the one conjured up for Margot Robbie’s composite character in Bombshell, while few can argue that Shuzhen Zhao was The Farewell’s true heart and soul. But I digress. I’m not going to sit here and proclaim that any of the women nominated this year don’t deserve to be there because quite honestly, I could do that without writing an editorial. I will say however that there when all is said and done, Lopez was far from the only casualty.
I remember writing a supporting actress editorial a couple of years ago in which I took the industry to task for the fact that the three favorites in the category (Allison Janney, Laurie Metcalfe and Holly Hunter) were all being praised for playing mothers while many other actresses turned in a collection of awards-worthy performances which had nothing to do with the fact that they could breed. Never did I think I would feel compelled to write a spiritual follow-up defending the merits and worthiness of two incredibly capable actresses so very clearly at the top of their games who social media is unwittingly pitting against one another. The truth is that both Lopez and Bates are the core of their films, emerging as the most dynamic figures in these real-life stories being played out on the big screen. Both actresses are also, for the most part, the sole driving force of their respective films in terms of awards. In spite of the “swooping in” claims, it should be pointed out that Bates was nominated alongside Lopez at the Golden Globes and kicked off awards season by winning Best Supporting Actress from the National Board of Review before either winning or being nominated by many of the same critics groups honoring Lopez.
There’s no denying the validity of who ended up being nominated in each of the categories. Even if Robbie’s role was the least compelling of Bombshell’s three leads and Best Actress nominee Cynthia Erivo is far better than the laughable Harriet deserves, both worked with what they had. Every Oscar season brings with it a different set of names many felt should have been nominated and with them, plenty of speculation as to why they weren’t. The long-running rumor of the Academy refusing to ever give an Oscar to a Saturday Night Live alum may be the reason both Murphy and Adam Sandler were left out in the Best Actor category. Although past cast members have been nominated, they’ve been few and far between and never (at least to my knowledge) in the same year. Also, apart from a slowly crumbling aversion to horror, the absence of Jordan Peele and Us could be due to the Academy not always willing to bestow too much love on an artist so soon after their last Oscar victory. Alejandro G. Iñárritu proved an exception, taking home wins for Birdman and The Revenant in back to back years, but Kathryn Bigelow couldn’t repeat her Hurt Locker success with the uber-nominated Zero Dark Thirty.
Whether or not the Academy was unwilling to embrace Lopez’s cinematic reinvention, or the fact that maybe the campaigns behind the films of some of the other nominated actresses proved stronger, are theories which remain up in the air. In an ideal world, both Bates and Lopez would have scored nominations. The two women have turned in a pair of performances which ended up being larger than the films they were starring in, showing the vastness of parts for women of different ages and races while helping to put their movies on the map. Lopez can rightfully claim to be responsible for much of Hustler’s box-office take while Bates’s turn helped ease some of the criticisms aimed at Richard Jewell. But never mind. As is typically the case when it comes to the Oscars, some years will undoubtedly be better than others; but Hollywood will seldom (if ever) get it right.