Robert Downey Jr.’s Oscar win shows the weirdness of the Supporting categories

Robert Downey Jr. just won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. “I would like to thank my terrible childhood and the Academy, in that order,” Downey quipped as he accepted his trophy. The award, which represents Downey’s first Oscar win and third nomination, is a slightly odd achievement, one that highlights the ambiguities of the Academy’s two Supporting categories.

Downey unquestionably turns in a terrific performance in Oppenheimer, putting all his nervy, twitchy charisma on full display. Yet Downey’s portion of Oppenheimer is also arguably the least essential part of the film. It’s a bureaucratic subplot about Downey’s character Lewis Strauss trying to get his appointment as Commerce secretary approved by the Senate, decades after the construction of the atomic bomb. You can read thematic importance into the Strauss parts of Oppenheimer, but there’s a lot less juice to them than there is to the grand, tragic story of Oppenheimer building the bomb.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who won Best Supporting Actress tonight, is in a similar situation. Randolph, playing boarding school cook Mary in The Holdovers, makes her character work in full defiance of the script. Mary is the most underwritten part in the trio at the heart of the film, but Randolph makes her tragically human through the sheer force of her presence.

These two wins function as a case study of sorts. They ask the question: Do the Best Supporting categories simply reward quality of performance, taking nothing else into account? Or do they reward performances for how well they support a larger story? Historically, the Academy has had trouble coming to a consensus on how to answer that question.

The Supporting categories are tricky to define, and so prone to controversy that this is actually Downey’s second slightly controversial nomination in the category. (He was nominated in 2009 for Tropic Thunder, a film for which he donned blackface.) Some ambiguity is even baked into the design of the Oscars. The Academy’s official rules state that any performer can enter the competition in either the lead or supporting categories, and that voters in the Acting Branch of the Academy can decide individually where each performance belongs.

This ambiguity makes the Supporting categories particularly prone to category fraud, when studios enter actors who are clearly in lead roles into the Oscars under the Supporting category so that they’ll have a better chance of winning. In 2018, The Favourite obviously had three leading actresses, but to avoid splitting their vote, the studio entered Olivia Colman as Best Actress and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as Best Supporting Actresses. (Fair’s fair: Colman didn’t have an Oscar at the time, but Stone and Weisz both did. Colman won hers that year after her co-stars got out of her way.) In 2016, Fences was a two-hander with screen time almost equally split between Viola Davis and Denzel Washington, but Washington was nominated for Best Actor and Davis for Best Supporting Actress.

At the other end of the spectrum, some Best Supporting nominees barely even appear in the movie for which they win. In 1959, Hermione Baddeley was nominated for just two minutes of screen time in Room at the Top, while Beatrice Straight won for six minutes in Network in 1977. More recently, Judi Dench infamously won Best Supporting Actress in 1999 for playing Queen Elizabeth for eight minutes in Shakespeare in Love. “I feel for eight minutes on the screen, I should only get a little bit of him,” Dench quipped of the Oscar statue in her acceptance speech.

The screen time controversies become especially instructive when we look at the occasions where they don’t come up. Like Dench in Shakespeare in Love, Viola Davis only appears in Doubt (2008) for about eight minutes total. Yet Davis’s performance is so riveting, so expressive of the shades of ambiguity and moral compromise that make Doubt work, that hardly anyone complained when she was nominated for Best Actress. To this day, her work in Doubt is considered one of the great small performances.

That Davis’s eight-minute nomination gets remembered as a triumph, while Dench’s eight-minute win is remembered more as one of those Harvey Weinstein machinations, suggests that people aren’t concerned about how long the Supporting performers are on screen so much as they care about what kind of impact those Supporting performers are able to create. For this bizarre, ambiguous category, what matters more than screen time is what kind of effect you’re able to put over in support of a bigger story.

That’s a test that Randolph passes in The Holdovers, but that Downey arguably fails in Oppenheimer. It’s been 16 years since I saw Doubt, and I still remember the way Davis flicked her eyes to one side as she considered what to do about her son’s questionable relationship with a priest. Yet as technically polished as Downey’s turn as Strauss is, I forgot what most of his deliveries sounded like within weeks of watching Oppenheimer.

Downey is an excellent actor. The enormous spotlight of his presence is central to what made the Marvel Cinematic Universe not just possible but, briefly, exciting. He’s equally capable of narrowing that light into the focused intensity of a performance like the one he turned in with 1987’s Less Than Zero. He is a genius at calibration, and he deserves to have an Oscar. That his Oscar came from this performance in particular feels like it’s going to be an odd bit of trivia 10 years from now.