The final slot is, quite understandably, always the hardest to predict, and that is certainly the case for the 2015 Best Supporting Actor race. While it may not be the deepest set of Best Supporting Actor contenders ever, there are a number of potential nominees that could steal the final spot. For instance, Christoph Waltz has won this award twice already and his turn in Tim Burton's Big Eyes is said to be one of the highlights of the film, but the fact the he has already won on two separate occasions may make Academy members feel like his performance is old news. Screen legend and Academy favorite Robert Duvall has been nominated six times previously and won Best Actor in 1984 for his turn in Tender Mercies, but his film this year, The Judge, was not looked upon too kindly by critics. Finally, Josh Brolin has received ample amounts of kudos for his performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's supposedly wacky Inherent Vice and is probably the biggest threat for this spot, but from the sound of things the film may simply be just too bizarre for the older-skewing Academy audiences. This leaves one possible option: Tom Wilkinson as President Lyndon Baines Johnson in Selma. The film focuses on Martin Luther King's famous civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama that helped lead to the passing of the landmark Civil Rights Act, supported and signed into law by President LBJ. It is obviously pretty lofty material for the actors to work with, which is always a plus when it comes to the Academy, but the film is said to have a very visceral impact on its audiences and Johnson's role of affecting change on the political side of things has been praised with almost the same level of enthusiasm as King's street-level work, which serves as the central focus of the film. Wilkinson has been twice nominated by the Academy before, so he is definitely no stranger to Oscar, but perhaps his biggest advantage in securing a third Academy Award nomination is the current political climate in the United States, which may make the opportunity to nominate Selma for multiple Oscars simply irresistible to many members of the Academy.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
