"Now, you men will only be risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor."
—Harvey Korman in Blazing Saddles

As the Academy Awards ceremony approaches, it is the season to predict. But as long as there are Oscars, it will also be the season to complain. Everyone has their gripes about the selections, be they the nominees or winners. But omissions and selections are not what I’m here to bitch about. No, what irks me is something that has irked me for some time (not of the sleepless nights variety, but irksome nonetheless) and has only gotten more pronounced in recent years—the random and, some might call it, unethical decision to place acting nominees not where they belong but in whatever category might guarantee them a better chance of winning. In other words, I’m referring to those performers in leading roles getting shoved into the supporting slot and supporting players elevated into the lead category.

This year has two clear examples of the former. The more outrageous is Hailee Steinfeld for True Grit. As anyone who has seen the  movie (or the earlier version with Kim Darby playing the same part) or read the original Charles Portis novel knows, this is Mattie Ross’s story from start to finish. And newcomer Steinfeld does play Mattie Ross, after all. True, Rooster Cogburn (the Jeff Bridges part) is a mighty dominant character and hard to forget, but Mattie has more footage and takes the journey that makes her the protagonist more so than anyone else in the film. Cogburn is part of her story, not the other way around. This must certainly be another example of Oscar’s bad habit of diminishing youthful performers (Steinfeld is 14 years old) by shifting them into support, as if they are not worthy to compete with the adults. They’ve done it in the past and, in fact, have twice bestowed Best Supporting Actress Oscars on youngsters who were clearly leads, 16-year-old Patty Duke (for The Miracle Worker) and 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal (for Paper Moon). Watch O'Neal accept the Oscar. Older than these ladies, but still being considered a youth, apparently, was 20-year-old Timothy Hutton who won his trophy for Ordinary People as Best Supporting Actor, despite being the movie’s center of attention. (Just for the record, O’Neal and Hutton remain the youngest winners of a competitive Academy Award for their respective sexes). Watch Hutton win the Oscar.

The other wrongly placed supporting performer from this year is somewhat less glaring. Although there is no doubt that Colin Firth is the main protagonist of The King’s Speech, is Geoffrey Rush really filling a supporting role in this picture in the manner that Helena Bonham Carter is? I’d say no. He has a tremendous deal of screen time and asked my opinion (and isn’t that what writing blogs are for?) I’d say he was just as much a lead as Firth. I’m certain that from the get-go it was decided that since these men both given outstanding performances and would have ended up siphoning off votes from one another were they to compete in the same category, everybody declared that Rush would take the subservient position, like it or not.

This sort of thing was not always the case. Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift were both deemed Best Actor nominees for From Here to Eternity, rather than wrongly shunting Lancaster into support (neither won); Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn went head-to-head as Best Actress for Suddenly, Last Summer (again, neither won); William Holden and Peter Finch were competitors for Best Actor for Network (Finch, who had died prior to receiving the nomination, won); and it would have looked awfully silly to demote one of the ladies to support, considering their character’s names made up the title, so both Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were Best Actress nominees for Thelma & Louise (neither won).  In fact, these women represented the very last time to date that two leading performers were in competition from the same movie. I’m guessing if the new “select a category” trend continues the way it has, Oscar campaigners and voters will make sure it never happens again.

There are some other dumb examples of this “category shifting.” Brokeback Mountain was a love story between two men not one, but for no better reason than the aforementioned desire to keep the competition to a minimum, Jake Gyllenhaal was deemed a supporting player while his partner (or should I say ‘pardner’?), Heath Ledger was put in the top category. The following year Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett shared the screen quite equally—in fact there’s a chance the former might have had more on-screen time—in Notes on a Scandal. But somehow Blanchett became a supporting nominee while Dame Judi qualified as the star. Even screwier than these was Jamie Foxx getting a supporting nod for Collateral, a story in which he definitely had more screen time than costar Tom Cruise, and was certainly the main protagonist. But he was busy getting nominated for another film, Ray, in the lead, so rather than, say, give the supporting spot to someone else altogether, the Academy gave him two separate slots in two separate categories. (He won for Ray, lost for Collateral). Watch Foxx win the Oscar.

Does billing matter where selecting categories are concerned? Not really. Back in 1963 both Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas ended up with Oscars for their great performances in Hud. But the odd thing was that Neal was deemed a lead and Douglas supporting, when in fact, in the opening credits of the movie, he is billed above her. That’s a head scratcher for me, because if indeed he’s supporting the star, Paul Newman (who was nominated in the lead slot), which in truth he is, then how come the performer listed under him is not supporting Newman too?  In the Academy’s favor, at least they properly nominated Julie Walters in the supporting category for Billy Elliot, despite the fact that she receives top billing in the movie’s credits. She was obviously supporting Billy himself, Jamie Bell, who was reduced, absurdly, to third billing. However, since the Oscars didn’t bother to nominate him, we are left speculating on whether he’d have ended up in support as well, being (there’s that youth ‘problem’ to confront yet again) a 14 year old at the time, after all. (Over in England, by the way, Bell did win their top trophy, the BAFTA, for the movie, in the leading category).

This questionable practice of category shifting doesn’t stop at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2008 Kate Winslet could be seen doing her customary excellent work in two movies released during “awards season,” The Reader and Revolutionary Road. She had a leading role in each and yet the pundits (as they are known) started speculating on whether Winslet could get dual nominations by having voters put the former performance in the supporting slot and the latter in the lead. And sure enough that’s just what the Golden Globes did, absurd as it was to consider her a supporting player in The Reader. Not only did they give her both nominations but she ended up winning both of them. One was led to believe that the Oscars were going to follow this ridiculous decision only to have them nominate her just once, for The Reader, as Best Actress. So, somehow she managed to be both supporting and lead for the same role, in the eyes of two organizations.

More examples? How about Jack Albertson (The Subject Was Roses), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt), Ethan Hawke (Training Day), and Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense), who were all listed as supporting contenders (Albertson actually won), though they hardly qualified as such judging from the ample size of their roles. Edmund Gwenn and Walter Matthau both won in the Best Supporting category for Miracle on 34^th Street and The Fortune Cookie, respectively, but when you think of those movies they are the first actors who come to mind, because they so thoroughly dominated them with unforgettable performances in roles that weren’t exactly subordinate ones. In a reversal of the same line of thinking, you certainly can’t forget Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, but he’s in less than a quarter of the two-hour plus movie, so how come he didn’t end up being treated like Gwenn and Matthau, instead making it into the Best Actor category and winning in the process? Watch Hopkins win the Oscar.

But then, come to think of it, the Academy has been mucking up this selection process from the time they first established the Supporting Actor and Actress categories in 1936. That year Luise Rainer (pictured on right) was placed in the Best Actress category  for her very brief part as William Powell’s first wife in The Great Ziegfeld. In so much as the movie ran over 3 hours in length, the amount of time she was on screen seemed even smaller. This was definitely a supporting role. And yet there she was, competing against and ultimately besting such ladies as Carole Lombard (My Man Godfrey) and Irene Dunne (Theodora Goes Wild), who certainly outdistanced Rainer when it came to screen time. Alas, not only did these two ladies go home empty-handed that night, but they would never receive an Oscar to call their own. I say let Hailee Steinfeld compete with Natalie Portman and Annette Bening; let Geoffrey Rush duke it out with Colin Firth and James Franco; and while we’re at it, let me select all the nominees in the future, because then everything would be perfect about the Academy Awards, every year. At least at my house.