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Why Is Jennifer Connelly a Supporting Actress?

By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2002, at 6:41 PM ET
Jennifer Connelly

Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Jennifer Connelly for best supporting actress for her role in A Beautiful Mind. But wasn't she the main actress in that movie? How does the Academy decide who is in a "leading role" for the Oscars and who is in a "supporting role"?

It's up to the voting members of the Academy. No rule determines the category for which an actor can be nominated. Every actor in every role in every movie that was released in 2001 was eligible for a nomination for either the leading or supporting award.

How does the voting work? The Academy uses a preferential voting system—members rank up to five preferred nominees in descending order. Click here for a detailed explanation of the system used by the Academy, and click here for a "Chatterbox" that discusses the system.

The 1,315 voting members in the Academy's actor's branch determine the nominees for best actor, best actress, best supporting actor, and best supporting actress. Actors cannot be nominated for more than one award. If an actress gets enough votes to qualify in both the supporting and leading categories, she is nominated in the category for which she got more votes. Once the nominees for each category are decided, the full Academy votes for the Oscar winners, using a more conventional plurality system (each member gets one vote per category, and the nominee with the most votes wins).

The voters who select the nominees can be influenced by the publicity campaigns orchestrated by movie studios to promote their pictures and stars. A Beautiful Mind's ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter promoted Jennifer Connelly for best supporting actress, not best actress. That may be because Connelly believed she had a better shot at winning a supporting actress nomination than a best actress nod. According to a Los Angeles Times report from last year, both Samuel L. Jackson (for Pulp Fiction) and William H. Macy (for Fargo) asked to be promoted as supporting actors for what were arguably leading roles in order to give them better shots at winning. (Studios may also push an actor for the supporting category because they don't want voters to divide their votes for one performance between both categories—causing the actor to not get nominated for either one.)

(Click here for a complete list of this year's Oscar nominees, and click here to learn what A Beautiful Mind omits from John Nash's life story.)

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Chris Suellentrop, a former Slate staffer, writes "The Opinionator" for the New York Times.
Photograph of Jennifer Connelly by Fred Prouser/Reuters.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:

There were some nice discussions on movies: following from Dilan Esper's post, below; and from Daniel Case's post here, (he mistakenly takes issue with Explainer--who is right back at him--but makes some other good points, and also gets into some other worthwhile threads.)


Reader Comments From The Fray:


Is the Academy obligated to nominate Judi Dench for an award these days? I understand that box office is no indicator of nominations, but can anyone really claim that this many people saw Iris? What's the deal? I propose a couple suggestions:

1. She's British, hence classy, hence classiness by association for the Academy.
2. She's older and distinctly unglamorous, hence the Academy is able to refute charges of "ageism," "looksism," or any other -ism.
3. People assume she's good because they're so used to seeing her name up there (didn't she get nominated for Chocolat? C'mon!)
4. The works of Iris Murdoch are much beloved by Academy voters.

--Dave J

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


The Oscars have never been about merit. (See Best Picture, 1941, where How Green Was My Valley won over Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon.) Rather, they are controlled by two variables: hype and sentiment. The reason why lead actors and actresses show up in the supporting category is easily explained by these two variables.

First, hype. The supporting actress category, especially, has evolved into a useful device for Hollywood to announce that young actresses have "arrived". Thus, Geena Davis wins for what is clearly a lead performance in The Accidental Tourist, Marisa Tomei wins for her lead performance in My Cousin Vinny. Angelina Jolie wins for Girl, Interrupted. If these actresses had been placed up against the Dame Judi Denches and Meryl Streeps of the world, they couldn't have won. But since Hollywood needs to fill its movies with young female stars to sell tickets, the Best Supporting Actress award gives the industry a platform to make the public believe these are good, Oscar-caliber actresses.

Second, sentiment. Oscar voters are well known for awarding Oscars as essentially "lifetime achievement awards" to actors they like, whether or not the performances they are supposedly recognizing are any good. Classifying what are actually lead performances into the supporting categories clears the way for best actor and best actress awards to be awarded based on sentiment to people such as Julia Roberts, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Paul Newman.

--Dilan Esper

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(2/13)


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