Oscar-ology 101: Best supporting actor

The Inquirer's movie critics, Steven Rea and Carrie Rickey, are spending the week before the Feb. 24 Academy Awards predicting the winners of the races. On Friday, they agreed that Ruby Dee (American Gangster) was the likely winner of the best supporting actress trophy. Today, they take up best supporting actor.

Steven Rea: The supporting actor category may be the hardest of the bunch, don't you think, Carrie? Each and every one of these performances was remarkable, and a case could be made for their respective wins. I'd have to say Casey Affleck is the longer shot, though. He brought the creepy obsession of a modern-day stalker fan to his portrait of Robert Ford in the slo-mo, arty western The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Roberd Ford (and he wasn't half bad in Gone, Baby, Gone, either). But it IS a slo-mo, arty western, not something the Academy voters are going gaga over, and Ben's little brother has a whole career ahead of him.

Carrie Rickey: This year, the supporting actor nominees are as vital to their movies as the leads. They function either the engine of the movie - like Affleck as the groupie/stalker in Assassination of Jesse James, Javier Bardem, chilling as the angel of death in No Country for Old Men and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the CIA strategist in Charlie Wilson's War - or, they are the moral center of the films, like Hal Holbrook as the father figure in Into the Wild and Tom Wilkinson as the lawyer whose conscience grows back in Michael Clayton.

Steven: Javier Bardem's stone-cold sociopath Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men is the stuff of nightmares, and he's got the awards momentum going with the Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and Golden Globe wins. I don't think Philip Seymour Hoffman will win here, but he had a great year in 2007, don't you think?

Carrie: No one's had a better year. Hoffman demonstrates his comic chops in Charlie Wilson's War, hides his anxiety behind a mask of composure in the devastating Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and is a repressed sadsack in the black-comic The Savages. He should get an award not only for the quality of his acting, but the breadth of his talent.

Bardem, the Spanish actor best known here for Before Night Falls, is pretty great, too, with that impassive face like an Easter Island statue. And, Lordy, Wilkinson plays the raving, lucid born-again moral lawyer like he was in an Arthur Miller play.