Chris Pine's character was the protagonist in Hell and High Water. Both Jeff Bridges and Ben Cooper were rightly in contention for Supporting Actor and Bridges was rightly nominated. He was, in fact, my choice for the win, having given a performance much better in my estimation than the won he actually won for.
I did not see Lucas Hedges as a co-lead in Manchester by the Sea. He was correctly nominated in support.
Viola Davis was the female lead in Fences but as Sabin pointed out, her screen time was much shorter than star Denzel Washington. I think she was properly nominated and deservedly won in support.
Dev Patel was clearly the lead in Lion but had he been in contention in the lead category I doubt he'd have been nominated so I marked him as a neither. However, I was pleased that he was nominated in support given the lack of serious contenders in the category and placed him there myself in my own awards.
Correcting Oscar 2016
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Correcting Oscar 2016
I couldn't find any egregious offenders in 2017 so I passed it over. I could maybe make the case for Sam Rockwell but that's not enough to sustain a thread.
2016 presents four reasonably big question marks to me and I don't really have a strong answer for any of them.
I want to remind everybody that the point of thread is to cast your vote and weigh in for how these performances should be considered and whether or not you think they would be competitive in a lead category. The 2016 Best Actor lineup was a pretty weak one. I absolutely think that Dev Patel could've gotten a nomination for Best Actor over Viggo Mortensen, Ryan Gosling, and Andrew Garfield.
Let's start with Dev Patel for Lion. What do you do when one actor plays a character at one age and another plays him at another in the same film? We've seen this before in My Left Foot and Shine and there wasn't much debate that the "adult" actors should be given lead status while the younger should be considered support. My Left Foot is a little more interesting because when Christy Brown is young, it certainly feels more like an ensemble affair. Like in Lion, David Helfgott is always the protagonist of his story regardless of the age range. The only difference is that the Noah Taylor sequences are bookended by Geoffrey Rush (despite having only 29.80% of screen-time) so he's the larger presence. But I digress...
I think Dev Patel is absolutely the lead of Lion. Saroo is the protagonist and this story is the passing of the torch from Sunny Pawar to Patel. And I think Dev Patel would have gotten a nomination for lead. It's interesting that there were two stories nominated this year about lives told through different actors, Moonlight and Lion. I think Lion is a much different case than Moonlight where there is no dominant actor carrying the torch for Chiron.
Viola Davis in Fences is a performance that I've sort of memory holed as a lead that was category frauded into support. But then I couldn't find a single group that honored Viola Davis in the leading category. Then I learned she has 38.6% screen-time in Fences. This is more than her other nominated performances (including her leading role in The Help, admittedly an ensemble film) but it's also much less than the Best Actress nominees:
-Ruth Negga, 42.57%
-Meryl Streep, 53.90%
-Natalie Portman, 76.47%
-Emma Stone, 63.19%
-Isabelle Huppert, 83.87%
Not to mention, it's less than her co-star's as well. Denzel Washington is in Fences for 67.47% of the RT. The most credible case I could make for her lead placement is that she won the Tony for lead. But film is a different beast. I thought Viola Davis would be one of the torches I carried for lead but I think a case could be made that the purpose of her character is that she is yet another orbiting satellites in Troy Maxon's world that is struggling to find peace.
I think she's appropriately considered supporting but her impact on the film is so big that I wouldn't begrudge anyone listing her as a lead, especially considering that if she was nominated in the leading category I really do think she would win.
The next two performances are questions of what happens when one character commandingly carries the B Story. I'll start with Lucas Hedges who has more screen-time than Viola Davis and plays Patrick, temporarily adopted by his uncle. Manchester by the Sea is one of those movies more defined by what doesn't happen than what does. Instead of two people having a positive impact on each other, it's about two figures who end up giving each other space, behave stubbornly, and are there for each other in sporadic times of need. In that sense, Lucas Hedges provides anti-support for Casey Affleck. It's ultimately Lee's story but Patrick has his own separate life that Lee barely is aware of.
This is a tricky case for me but I think I'm going to vote to keep him in support because there isn't really much going on in the Patrick story besides trying to hook up with a girl and emotional survival. He's just a floating New England personality that is Lee's responsibility.
And then there's Jeff Bridges in Hell or High Water, who occupies 33.88% screen-time in the film. Hell or High Water is sort of like a Fugitive/Detective dynamic where one story is on the run and the other is in pursuit. Traditionally, the Fugitive storyline contains the protagonist while the detective has the deuteragonist. But what happens when both storylines feature two characters and both storylines feature one who doesn't make it until the end. Does that mean that the survivors are the film's leads? It's been a while since I've seen Hell or High Water but I don't think it feels right to call Chris Pine definitively more the lead than Jeff Bridges. Certainly, nobody would consider Chris Pine and Ben Foster as protagonists.
The film it is most reminiscent of is No Country for Old Men, where most are in agreement that Josh Brolin is the lead while Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem are supporting. I would agree with that placement because that's how the film presents itself (in the traditional form) for the bulk of its running time until the abrupt ending. Hell or High Water is a film that takes a slightly different approach. It withholds its key information until the end, and it ends with what feels like the start of a new beginning, one that locks Chris Pine and Jeff Bridges together in ways that they weren't before.
It's been a while since I've seen Hell or High Water but tentatively I'm comfortable calling Jeff Bridges one of the film's two leads. Either that or there are no leads and they're all subordinate to something larger than themselves but because the film doesn't reveal that until the end I don't think I support that conclusion entirely.
I'll welcome anyone else's thoughts but I think Jeff Bridges could be considered a lead in Hell or High Water and he would be nominated.
Now, I opened this post by encouraging people to weigh in on what they think the appropriate category placement is, not what they can live with. All four of these placements are so borderline to me that I would understand anyone doing the latter.
2016 presents four reasonably big question marks to me and I don't really have a strong answer for any of them.
I want to remind everybody that the point of thread is to cast your vote and weigh in for how these performances should be considered and whether or not you think they would be competitive in a lead category. The 2016 Best Actor lineup was a pretty weak one. I absolutely think that Dev Patel could've gotten a nomination for Best Actor over Viggo Mortensen, Ryan Gosling, and Andrew Garfield.
Let's start with Dev Patel for Lion. What do you do when one actor plays a character at one age and another plays him at another in the same film? We've seen this before in My Left Foot and Shine and there wasn't much debate that the "adult" actors should be given lead status while the younger should be considered support. My Left Foot is a little more interesting because when Christy Brown is young, it certainly feels more like an ensemble affair. Like in Lion, David Helfgott is always the protagonist of his story regardless of the age range. The only difference is that the Noah Taylor sequences are bookended by Geoffrey Rush (despite having only 29.80% of screen-time) so he's the larger presence. But I digress...
I think Dev Patel is absolutely the lead of Lion. Saroo is the protagonist and this story is the passing of the torch from Sunny Pawar to Patel. And I think Dev Patel would have gotten a nomination for lead. It's interesting that there were two stories nominated this year about lives told through different actors, Moonlight and Lion. I think Lion is a much different case than Moonlight where there is no dominant actor carrying the torch for Chiron.
Viola Davis in Fences is a performance that I've sort of memory holed as a lead that was category frauded into support. But then I couldn't find a single group that honored Viola Davis in the leading category. Then I learned she has 38.6% screen-time in Fences. This is more than her other nominated performances (including her leading role in The Help, admittedly an ensemble film) but it's also much less than the Best Actress nominees:
-Ruth Negga, 42.57%
-Meryl Streep, 53.90%
-Natalie Portman, 76.47%
-Emma Stone, 63.19%
-Isabelle Huppert, 83.87%
Not to mention, it's less than her co-star's as well. Denzel Washington is in Fences for 67.47% of the RT. The most credible case I could make for her lead placement is that she won the Tony for lead. But film is a different beast. I thought Viola Davis would be one of the torches I carried for lead but I think a case could be made that the purpose of her character is that she is yet another orbiting satellites in Troy Maxon's world that is struggling to find peace.
I think she's appropriately considered supporting but her impact on the film is so big that I wouldn't begrudge anyone listing her as a lead, especially considering that if she was nominated in the leading category I really do think she would win.
The next two performances are questions of what happens when one character commandingly carries the B Story. I'll start with Lucas Hedges who has more screen-time than Viola Davis and plays Patrick, temporarily adopted by his uncle. Manchester by the Sea is one of those movies more defined by what doesn't happen than what does. Instead of two people having a positive impact on each other, it's about two figures who end up giving each other space, behave stubbornly, and are there for each other in sporadic times of need. In that sense, Lucas Hedges provides anti-support for Casey Affleck. It's ultimately Lee's story but Patrick has his own separate life that Lee barely is aware of.
This is a tricky case for me but I think I'm going to vote to keep him in support because there isn't really much going on in the Patrick story besides trying to hook up with a girl and emotional survival. He's just a floating New England personality that is Lee's responsibility.
And then there's Jeff Bridges in Hell or High Water, who occupies 33.88% screen-time in the film. Hell or High Water is sort of like a Fugitive/Detective dynamic where one story is on the run and the other is in pursuit. Traditionally, the Fugitive storyline contains the protagonist while the detective has the deuteragonist. But what happens when both storylines feature two characters and both storylines feature one who doesn't make it until the end. Does that mean that the survivors are the film's leads? It's been a while since I've seen Hell or High Water but I don't think it feels right to call Chris Pine definitively more the lead than Jeff Bridges. Certainly, nobody would consider Chris Pine and Ben Foster as protagonists.
The film it is most reminiscent of is No Country for Old Men, where most are in agreement that Josh Brolin is the lead while Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem are supporting. I would agree with that placement because that's how the film presents itself (in the traditional form) for the bulk of its running time until the abrupt ending. Hell or High Water is a film that takes a slightly different approach. It withholds its key information until the end, and it ends with what feels like the start of a new beginning, one that locks Chris Pine and Jeff Bridges together in ways that they weren't before.
It's been a while since I've seen Hell or High Water but tentatively I'm comfortable calling Jeff Bridges one of the film's two leads. Either that or there are no leads and they're all subordinate to something larger than themselves but because the film doesn't reveal that until the end I don't think I support that conclusion entirely.
I'll welcome anyone else's thoughts but I think Jeff Bridges could be considered a lead in Hell or High Water and he would be nominated.
Now, I opened this post by encouraging people to weigh in on what they think the appropriate category placement is, not what they can live with. All four of these placements are so borderline to me that I would understand anyone doing the latter.
"How's the despair?"