All About Awards Show Season

Veteran actress Ruby Dee with Denzel Washington in American Gangster.
© Universal Pictures

This year’s Oscar honor roll features an unusually large number of first-timers, beginning with a pair of actors who have waited a long time for the honor. Eighty-three-year-old Ruby Dee gets the nod as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Frank Lucas’ no-nonsense mom in American Gangster, while the soon-to-be 83-year-old Hal Holbrook (he celebrates his birthday a week before the Academy Awards telecast) is a sentimental favorite in the Best Supporting Actor category, thanks to his very tender portrayal of a wizened old man in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild.

Should they win, Holbrook, Dee and any of the eight other Oscar rookies listed below are poised to provide the February 24th ceremony with some of its emotional high points. Provided of course the 80th Annual Academy Awards will not be derailed by the ongoing WGA writers strike.

Viggo Mortensen, Best Actor (Eastern Promises): Reteaming with History of Violence director David Cronenberg, Mortensen once again delivers a performance that resonates with coiled intensity. This time around, he is Nikolai, an impeccably dressed driver working for the father and son of a Russian mafia family operating in London, England. All is routine until he crosses paths with a plucky nurse (Naomi Watts) who unintentionally stirs in Nikolai renewed feelings of self-examination.

Mortensen was part of the team that won the Screen Actors Guild’s Best Ensemble Cast Award for their work in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But the role of Nikolai has launched him on an unprecedented awards season roll, earning Best Actor nominations from the Golden Globes, BAFTA and the SAG.  Such recognition makes it clear that Cronenberg has turned out to be the perfect match for Mortensen’s immersive process.

Newcomer and Best Actress
nominee Ellen Page.
© Getty

Ellen Page, Best Actress (Juno): Page seemingly came out of nowhere to feast on the sassy dialogue of debuting screenwriter Diablo Cody, catapulting this teen pregnancy comedy into the ranks of the year’s Best Pictures as the plucky heroine who decides to have her baby and give it up for pre-assigned adoption to a well-heeled upper middle class couple (Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner).

Page is part of a major 2007 Canadian film comedy invasion, one that also includes her director Jason Reitman, co-star Michael Cera and fellow pregnancy comedy protagonist Seth Rogen (Knocked Up, Superbad). As such, the Halifax native turned out to be the perfect match for screenwriter Diablo’s brassy alter ego.

Marion Cotillard, Best Actress (La Vie en Rose): After the tour de force performances by Jamie Foxx in Ray and Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line, this young French actress pulled off the seemingly impossible. She delivered, as French chanteuse Edith Piaf, a musical biopic performance that arguably tops the aforementioned Oscar winning and nominated predecessors.

Cotillard chose to lip synch the songs, a la Foxx, rather than sing them herself as Phoenix did for his portrayal of Johnny Cash. But as good as the singing scenes are, it is Cotillard’s ability to capture the fiery persona of Piaf offstage that really seals the deal.

John Ashton with Amy Ryan and Ed Harris in Gone Baby Gone.
© Miramax Films

Amy Ryan, Best Supporting Actress (Gone Baby Gone): Nominated in both 2000 and 2005 for the Best Actress Tony Award, Ryan brilliantly applies every ounce of her New York theatrical smarts to the part of neglectful Boston mom Helene McReady. As the character who is smack dab in the middle of the intrigue being investigated by a pair of junior private eyes (Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan), she portrays in this modern noir a sort of upside-down femme fatale, forever trying to reassure herself that she’s still got what it takes to attract the opposite sex.

Juno director Jason Reitman.
© Fox Searchlight Pictures

Jason Reitman, Best Director (Juno): This was truly the shocker of the 2007 Academy Awards nominations, an honor no pundit saw coming. By leaping over such hyped fifth slot contenders as Sidney Lumet, Sean Penn, Joe Wright and David Cronenberg, Reitman confirmed just how popular a film his sophomore effort turned out to be with Academy voters.

Reitman has already announced his intentions to reteam with Juno screenwriter Cody Diablo and who can blame him? Juno may well turn out to be the starting point of a long and fruitful Hollywood writer-director relationship.

Tony Gilroy, Best Director (Michael Clayton): Topping Reitman in a sense, screenwriter and first-time director Gilroy rode a late cresting wave of awards season momentum to score nominations as both Best Director and for Best Original Screenplay. His tale of a law firm fixer (George Clooney) caught between a wayward partner (Tom Wilkinson) and fearsome corporate foe (Tilda Swinton) produced one of the most compact thrillers in years.

Gilroy cut his teeth as a writer on the Bourne action trilogy, and it shows here in the film’s pacing. It’s also somewhat remarkable that as a first-time director, he was able to elicit a trio of Oscar nominated performances from Clooney, Wilkinson and Swinton alongside actor-director Sydney Pollack, who is silky smooth as the law firm’s senior partner.

Atonement co-star Saoirse Ronan.
© Getty

Saoirse Ronan, Best Supporting Actress (Atonement): Though Atonement lost some steam over the course of awards season and saw its two leads (Keira Knightley, James McAvoy) fall out of Oscar contention, this 13-year-old Irish girl held firm with her portrayal of the naively misguided younger sister. In the film, it is her pre-World War II actions that precipitate a tumultuous turn of events affecting her older sister (Knightley) and the man who loves her (McAvoy).

Ronan is currently filming another highly anticipated literary adaptation, Peter Jackson’s film version of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Starring as the deceased daughter of a mourning couple (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz), Ronan appears to be well on her way to stardom.

Casey Affleck, Best Supporting Actor (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford): Ben’s younger brother broke through in 2007 with not one but two towering lead performances. In the space of just a few weeks last fall, Affleck hit the screens in Ben’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone and then as the stumbling coward opposite Brad Pitt as the famous outlaw. In both cases, he was able to telegraph a wide range of pent up emotions.

In person, Affleck is the nicest guy, someone for whom acting seems to be an essentially uncomplicated process. Still, it definitely didn’t hurt in this case that his Gone director knew just how to push his brother’s buttons on set.