A quick look at the Oscars’ betting markets and you won’t find much value or doubt on who will be walking away with the main awards.
Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour) is an unbackable favourite for Best Actor, Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) is a certainty for Best Actress and Sam Rockwell (Billbaords) looks set to take out Best Supporting Actor.
Best Picture is a little murkier with The Shape of Water and Billboards looming as the two main chances to fight it out.
It’s not surprising with so much information on hand to know how the Academy is thinking, plus those are undoubtedly standout performances in what turned out to be a strong movie year.
One other category with a clear favourite which doesn’t seem quite so warranted is Allison Janney (I, Tonya) for Best Supporting Actress.
Janney’s performance as LaVona Golden, the abusive mother of Tonya Harding, is memorable and at most times unsettling, however is it really that much more impressive than another supporting actress who plays a mother? Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird).
Leading actress Saoirse Ronan, who also earned an Oscar nom as the titular character, is the star of the coming-of-age comedy/drama, but don’t sleep on how influential Metcalf is as her mother, Marion.
Marion McPherson isn’t a typical motherly character in a movie like Lady Bird. She races from being caring, to blunt, to loving, to furious and back to caring, sometimes all within the same scene. Lady Bird is a feel-good character everyone gets behind, but Metcalf needs to be grounded, the key character to portray the family’s situation of battling to make ends meet on “the wrong side of the tracks’ in Sacramento.
From her opening scene where she tells her daughter to attend community college so she can experience jail and then go back to city college, to her final moments of refusing to even say good bye as Lady Bird jets off to New York, Metcalf always teeters on being unlikeable but you always sympathise with the struggling parent, working double shifts at the psychiatric hospital. Every decision she makes is for her children.
Through the lens of Lady Bird, Metcalf often comes across as the key villain in the movie. With her upbeat personality and a father who rarely even raises his voice, her mother acts as the voice of reason, often blanketing the whimsical nature coming from the perky high school graduate.
Yet Metcalf always allows the audience to understand her motivation and why she is often so tough on her only daughter. From begging her to say something to Lady Bird after discovering she was on a college waiting list on the other side of the country, your heart also breaks when she finds Lady Bird and her friends cooking up a storm in her kitchen on Thanksgiving night, so disappointed the family didn’t spend the day together.
And while you chide the way she often dismisses Lady Bird’s hopes and dreams for the future, particularly when it comes to colleges, the sight of her painstakingly trying to write a good bye before her daughter leaves for NYC is a reminder for all parents, they never want their child to leave.
Janney by contrast has one emotion, and one emotion only, rage. In fairness she is playing a real person and judging by the interview footage we get of Ms. Golden in the closing credits, Janney really only had that one emotion to work with.
She does have some memorable scenes, Tonya’s wedding and her attempt to record her own daughter immediately springing to mind. While there also is the key moment a knife ends up sticking out of Tonya’s arm. But she does feel removed down the stretch, with her younger years and the earlier scenes in the move feeling distant to how it all unravels by the end.
She shouldn’t be demoted for that, and she won’t be, having already swept the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards, suggesting her first Oscar triumph isn’t too far away, but Metcalf just leaves a bigger impression than Janney in their two respective performances.
There’s something about being so unlikeable that speaks to Oscar voters, J.K. Simmons in Whiplash one recent example. However, Metcalf’s ability to at times feel like that while always being as sweet as her daughter should lead to a closer final race.