Oscar favourites: the stories at stake for Leto, Lawrence and Lupita Nyong'o

EACH week before the Oscars, which take place on 2 March, Guardian film reviewer Tom Shone breaks down the likely winners at this year's Academy Awards. Today: best supporting actor, best supporting actress, best documentary feature, best documentary short and best live action short.
The precursors have been dished out. The critics and guilds have spoken. The Oscar commenteriat are nearing the end of their five-month marathon of prognosis and pre-cogitation. All that's left now is for the 6,000 or so members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recover from the previous night’s intake of chardonnay and crustless sandwiches, shake off the aerial bombardment of billboards and For Your Consideration ads, pick up their pencil and vote. There are no solid rules to guessing what happens next, but as veteran Oscarologist Mark Harris pointed out a few years back, “a good Oscar narrative makes voters feel that, by writing a name on a ballot, they’re completing a satisfying plotline.”
Ampas members are in the business of storytelling, never more so than on the one night of the year they present their best face to the world. 12 Years a Slave is this year’s "Chance to Make History". Gravity is "The Big Gamble That Paid Off". Her is "The Movie That Speaks to This Moment". Matthew McConaughey is "The Comeback Kid" who paid his dues. Otherwise known as: "It’s His Turn," or, "It’s Time."

Jared Leto’s Oscar narrative, on the other hand, has been a little fuzzy. He has forgotten the name of critics' groups who have given him awards. He’s touchy about the hair. ("Are you kidding?" he snapped, backstage at the Golden Globes. "There's no ombré.”) His acceptance speeches have been on the graceless side, cracking jokes about body waxing and reminding everyone that he took a six-year break from acting to front a rock band. (The worst subtext imaginable: "I don't need you.") It is not Leto’s turn, or his time. And yet when the Oscar for best supporting actor is announced at the Kodak theatre just under a month, Leto is likely going to be the winner.
How so? The role, as the transgender Aids patient Rayon in Dallas Buyer’s Club, involves a lot of the heavy-lifting the Academy always likes to see. It was physically transformative (Leto lost 40lbs), showed “daring” (translation: he played transgender). And the role nestles comfortably close to an adjacent set of philanthropic concerns (Aids, gay rights).

By comparison, the performance of Leto’s main competition, Michael Fassbender, nominated for his sadistic plantation owner in 12 Years a Slave, is perhaps a little too enmeshed in that character’s pathology for comfort. The academy like to give Oscars to villains but prefers them to be entirely fictional, to eat the scenery, or have a wisecrack or two up their sleeve – think Anthony Hopkins Hannibal Lecter, Heath Ledger’s Joker, or Christoph Waltz’s Nazi in Inglorious Basterds, whereas Ralph Fiennes’s filigree turn as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List went unrewarded. They love-to-hate entertaining bad guys, but they don’t like the genuinely nasty, or clinically psychopathic. It looks too much like siding with an actual Nazi or slave-owner.
Both the supporting races this year have been shaped by notable absentees. Just as Leto can thank his lucky stars Ampas decided to overlook Tom Hanks for his performance as Walt Disney in Saving Mr Banks, so, too, has the award for best supporting actress been reconfigured around the absent Oprah Winfrey. That contest is now a faceoff between Jennifer Lawrence, for her sexy, bored, stay-at-home mom in American Hustle, and Lupita N’yongo for her slave girl Patsy, a vision of grace-in-suffering, in 12 Years a Slave.
Both would be deserving winners, but a vote for Lawrence, just a year after she won for Silver Linings Playbook, would amount to an extraordinary coronation of the already globe-conquering 22-year-old, whereas Nyong’o's transformation from ingenue to star of the red carpet has supplied this year with its dazzling-ingénue narrative. Plus ça change. That was Lawrence’s narrative last year. Nyong’o will be hard to resist.

Best documentary also comes down to a two-hander. In one hand is Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, in which an elderly Indonesian torturer enacts his genocidal crimes for the cameras, this time as movie scenes – an experiment in documentary film-making that is by turns bold, bizarre and Brechtian. In the other is Morgan Neville’s Sundance blissful crowd-pleaser, Twenty Feet From Stardom, which sings the unsung careers of backing singers. This year the rules changed: it’s the entire academy voting for best documentary, not just the documentary branch, so expect a slight swing towards consensus choices. Twenty Feet From Stardom should just edge it.

Best supporting actor:

Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips
Bradley Cooper, American Hustle
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
Jonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall Street
Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
The winner: Leto

Best supporting actress:

Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a Slave
Julia Roberts, August: Osage County
June Squibb, Nebraska
The winner: Nyong’o

Best documentary feature:

The Act of Killing
Cutie and the Boxer
Dirty Wars
The Square
20 Feet from Stardom
The winner: Twenty Feet From Stardom

Best live action short:
Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn't Me)
Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just before Losing Everything)
Helium
Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?)
The Voorman Problem
The winner: The Voorman Problem

Best documentary short:
CaveDigger
Facing Fear
Karama Has No Walls
The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall
The winner: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

Compiled by RozToday Reporter

Source @TheGuardian