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Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Fox Searchlight Pictures, Sony Pictures Classics, Warner Bros Pictures 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. Sometimes a steamroller of a performance gets nipped at the last second.
Paul Schrader’s Affliction had a hard enough time fighting for Nick Nolte’s performance in the Best Actor race in 1998. The subject matter was grim, and the studio was barely a year old and had another, more Oscar-friendly contender in its stable in Gods and Monsters. 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.
But that’s the funny thing about awards math. When two front-runners in a five-person race end up splitting votes fairly evenly, the threshold for a third-place contestant to catch up falls a lot lower. And so there was Adrien Brody, an up-and-coming actor enjoying his first-ever nomination for playing real-life composer and Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman in The Pianist.
There is an irresistible pull to Olivia Colman’s Best Actress win over presumed front-runner Glenn Close; it’s one you play back again and again, not unlike the Zapruder film, to watch everybody’s reaction. The entire Oscars season had felt like one long coronation for the then-seven-times-nominated but zero-times-a-winner Close, who hides what must have been her crushing disappointment remarkably well.
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