Best Supporting Actress 1999

[Big Magilla]

For me there were two tiers of of four each award-worthy performances this year.

In the first tier there were Joan Plowright as young Franco Zeffirelli's protector and mentor in his semi-autobiographical Tea With Mussolini; Maggie Smith as the self-deluded Mussolini apologist in the same film; Jessica Lange as the ferocious Tamora in Titus and Sissy Spacek as the daughter who waits for her father's return in in The Straight Story.

In the second tier there were Cameron Diaz playing against type as John Cusack's homely, neurotic wife in Being John Malkovich; Catherine Keener as the office sexpot who comes between Cusack and Diaz in unexpected ways in the same film; Chloe Sevigny as the confused object of Hilary Swank's affections in Boys Don't Cry and Julianne Moore as the discontented wife of a dying old man in Magnolia. My early expectation was that all four women in the second tier and one of the older actresses in the first tier, probably Sissy Spacek, would end up being the Oscar nominees.

That was before Angelina Jolie emerged as the front-runner for her playing Winona Ryder's suicidal roommate in Girl, Interrupted.

The nominations of both Toni Collette and Samantha Morton puzzled me. Collette, though excellent in The Sixth Sense takes a bit of a backseat to Haley Joel Osment as her young son. Morton was in one of Woody Allen's lesser films, but I suppose the fact that she was playing handicapped (she was a mute) in Sweet and Lowdown earned her a few points.

Among the actual nominees, Keener and Sevigny are for me the only possible picks. I vote for Sevigny.