Best supporting actor is an odd fellows club

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Fergie talking acting, singing in 'Nine'
Dec. 23: Singer Fergie talks about her transition from the concert stage to the silver screen for the musical "Nine". NBC's Mike Wilber reports.

Lewis on 'Nine'

Cheryl Hines makes her directorial debut

Filmmaker Rob Marshall on ‘Nine’

Murphy autopsy finds no signs of trauma

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December movies
James Cameron’s spectacle “Avatar” hits theaters, along with George Clooney, who is “Up in the Air,” and Robert Downey Jr. as “Sherlock Holmes.”

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The ‘I'm sorry we ignored you last year’ award
Paul Giamatti doesn't have any such critical momentum behind him. “Cinderella Man” did reasonably well at the box office, but Giamatti's is the only “major” nomination for Ron Howard's boxing opus, and the movie came out in the summertime — most people have forgotten it.

Paul Giamatti
Universal Pictures / Reuters
Not that the movie itself really matters, because Giamatti isn't actually nominated for that work. He's nominated because the Academy feels guilty that it insulted his performances in both “Sideways” and “American Splendor” by ignoring both of them completely. Giamatti is never going to get the Brad Pitt roles, but he's one of the most reliably excellent actors working today, and it looks like the nominating committee feels bad about taking so long to acknowledge that.

Should Giamatti have gotten a nomination for the Harvey Pekar role? Absolutely. Should he have beaten Sean Penn that year? Absolutely. (He wouldn't have, mind you. The Academy loves a scenery-chewer. But he should have.) But they can't turn back time, so they've nominated him for the Joe Gould role instead, and if the voters base their choices on acting, Giamatti will win. He turned in the best per se performance in the group.

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If the voters base their choices on sentiment, Giamatti will still win, because he's due, and Mr. and Mrs. John Q. America love nothing more than the triumph of an underdog. But if the voters go with heat, with buzz, with a more popularity-contest approach, or with their desire for a clean sweep, he could go home with nothing.

Hard race to call
Alas, we just have no idea what the voters do base their choices on, because if we did, we'd understand how William Hurt got nominated for the lesser of two roles, why the weakest supporting actor in “Crash” is the only one who got a shot, or how Tim Robbins beat Djimon Hounsou in “In America” with that twitchy, spazzy performance in “Mystic River.” (Yeah, it was two years ago, but it's still completely baffling.)

But we can guess. We can guess that Hurt's part (and the movie it's in) isn't big enough, that voters will give Ledger best actor and feel they've done right by “Brokeback” in that regard, that Dillon's too weird of a choice for most. That leaves two: Clooney and Giamatti.

Giamatti deserves it. But if you want to win your Oscar pool, go with Clooney — and feel good about it. He might not have entirely earned it as an actor, but at least he won't make a mockery of it with a movie like Robin “Jakob the Liar” Williams.

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