Let’s just start with the thing everyone cares about most: Yes, it has suddenly become entirely likely that Glenn Close will finally win her Oscar, after four cruel decades (and seven nominations) of being denied. Sure, she hasn’t technically been nominated for best supporting actress at the Oscars yet—for her role in Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy—but her nod at the Screen Actors Guild Awards this week seems to indicate that there is a swell of support for her within the industry. Close’s Globes nomination, also announced this week, was more expected—and while that voting group has no overlap with the Academy, Close’s inclusion certainly doesn’t hurt her campaign. What the Globes nod mostly confirms is that Hillbilly hasn’t been forgotten, as, perhaps, some of it wish it had.
None of this comes as any sort of guarantee, of course. Close also had a swell of support for her role in 2018’s The Wife, until The Favourite’s Olivia Colman came and snatched away the best actress Oscar in one of the bigger Academy Awards upsets in recent memory. Colman is nominated against Close at the SAGs again this year, for her work in The Father. But I don’t think she’s Close’s main competition. That’s probably Maria Bakalova, the Bulgarian newcomer who has won a host of critics prizes for her star turn in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Bakalova is nominated as a leading actor at the Globes, but probably only because they have a comedy category. She’ll be slotted into supporting at the Oscars, just as she is at SAGs, where she could become a rare comedy player to win an acting prize.
There’s also the question of Mank’s Amanda Seyfried, long seeded as a frontrunner but now flagging a bit after a SAG snub. Bakalova might be too out-there for some voters, Seyfried not quite popular enough. Which could leave a Glenn Close-shaped hole in the competition, one that the actress could finally, finally walk through—the ironic tragedy being that in all likelihood, Close will not be feted in an auditorium full of hundreds of people and at after-parties until the wee hours (ahem). She could very well be at home, on Zoom, clutching this elusive trophy in relative solitude. Still, she’ll have it.
Close wouldn’t be the first actor to win an overdue Oscar for a movie that doesn’t quite live up to the brilliance of their career. But Hillbilly Elegy is reviled by many, more of an actual blemish on her resume than something merely forgettable. That the Screen Actors Guild rallied around her and her leading co-star Amy Adams could indicate some kind of silent majority support for the film, or maybe just long-standing love of these particularly famous awards also-rans. Regardless, something about Hillbilly’s recognition seems to further amplify the disconnect between critics and the rest of the film community.
Perhaps it’s the confirmation bias of my specific Twitter feed, but the Close of it all seemed to be the biggest single story to come out of the slew of film nominations announced in the last few days. (The TV side of things stirred up plenty of consternation and outrage, too, but I’m going to stick to the Oscars here.) There are other intriguing narratives taking shape beyond Close, though. What, for example, are we to make of Jared Leto’s Globes and SAGs nominations? Perhaps it’s residual Joker fever. Leto’s spooky, blank-faced murderer in The Little Things is not too far afield of Joaquin Phoenix’s victorious turn in Joker last year. (To say nothing of Leto’s own maligned work as the killer clown in Suicide Squad.) Doing another of his effortful gonzo routines, Leto adds some life to an otherwise dull movie, but he’s not very good in it. Perhaps his nominations can simply be chalked up to a strong, savvy campaign on the part of Warner Bros.—the studio hosted lots of virtual screenings that included a Q&A with Leto, some faint facsimile of all the usual starry meeting and greeting that happens in Los Angeles (and a bit in New York) during most normal awards seasons.
To many film fans’ frustration, Leto’s presence in the supporting race has so far seemed to preclude Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci, another critics group favorite who was blanked at both the Globes and the SAGs. But fear not! There is precedent for an actor not recognized by either of those bodies still snagging a nomination at the Oscars, like Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight, or Jonah Hill in The Wolf of Wall Street. Those are maybe not everyone’s favorite Oscar nominations, but they’re still historical indicators that Raci is not down for the count just yet.
Elsewhere, the SAGs gave us reason to hope. The nominators really went for Minari, giving nods to Yuh-Jung Youn, Steven Yeun, and the ensemble as a whole. The Venn diagram of SAG voters and those in the Academy is by no means a perfect circle, but the love for Minari probably does indicate that there is a lot of positive sentiment for the film among the actors’ branch of the Academy, the largest voting bloc in the institution. That’s good news for a movie that didn’t do as well as hoped with critics’ prizes this winter, and still has yet to be seen by most of the country.
Minari’s nominated cast is mostly Korean and Korean-American. Da 5 Bloods is mostly Black and Vietnamese actors. One Night in Miami…’s cast is mostly Black, as is the nominated ensemble of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Those nominees make for a more racially and ethnically diverse lineup than has tended to be recognized by big Hollywood awards bodies at once. Only The Trial of the Chicago 7 features a predominantly white cast. That breadth of representation should bode well for an Oscars that’s not quite so white—though of course, not all is well in matters of representation. Of the 48 total ensemble actors nominated at the SAGs, only 10 are female.