Uri wrote:
5. The MVP. These are the members of an evenly spread ensemble piece who seem to stand out, for some reason. They are the likes of David Niven, Glenda Jackson #1, McDormand #1 as well.
This is the group I find most interesting., and I find I have differing responses to them, partly due to when in life I encountered them.
Niven was already in the history books when I saw his film, on TV, while in high school. I didn't question his placement at the time -- he seemed the flm's standout to my 16 year old self. (I think, as Reza notes, he also benefited from being such a long-time star. I remember reading a post-Oscar quote in a 1959 Hollywood Reporter that said the voting for both him and and Hayward was "more like a census than a competition.")
I saw Women in Love while on Spring vacation my freshman year in high school. The film was well-praised, but not in any way a box-office hit. I was, like most, impressed with the then-mostly-unknown Jackson, but thought if she had any shot at the Oscars, it would be in the supporting category. What I hadn't calculated was that this would be the inaugural "there are no decent roles for women" year for the Oscars -- a development that would recur over the next decade (reaching its nadir in 1975). Give so few choices, the critics' groups went unanimously for Jackson, making her the prime challenger to (ugh) Ali MacGraw, who many were still betting on as awards night rolled around.
By the time of Fargo, I had become my fully aging self. I thought she was clearly the greatest thing about Fargo, but I still thought it was a stretch to label her lead. In the end, I'm happy she was, as my choice (Emily Watson) wouldn't have won an Oscar in a thousand tries, and the bumping of McDormand to lead gave us the never-matched Binoche-over-Bacall upset. But, in my mind, McDormand's win last year is her first fully legit best actress win.
My suspicion is, Olivia Colman will be added to this list in a few months, and I'll quibble about her, too.
Uri wrote:6. The Raison D’etre. It’s a limited in scale key character which seem to loom over the whole film it’s in. Redgrave in Julia and Hopkins in TSotL are prime examples of this type.
I don't think these two are quite equivalent. Redgrave, while the off-screen focus (and of course title character), really only gets the one (exceptional) scene in Julia, and is clear supporting. I know people have done stopwatches on Hopkins that say he had under 20 minutes...but those scenes between him and Foster are the core of the film, and they cast a far greater shadow than Redgrave did over her film. I heard people advocate for Hopkins as supporting back in '91, and it struck me that he would have had an insuperable advantage over any other candidate, because of the dominance of his role, which didn't seem fair. So, while I can see it's debatable, I never had a real problem with elevating Hopkins to lead there.