The movie Kate Winslet “absolutely loved” and called “extraordinary on every level”
The process of campaigning for awards can be intensive and often a bit ridiculous, but Kate Winslet took time out of the process to highlight the strengths of one of her competitors.
Winslet earned her first nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for her breakthrough performance in Sense & Sensibility, but she would have to wait over a decade to finally be crowned as a winner, which came with The Reader, which earned her her sixth nomination and first ‘Best Actress’ trophy, placing her at the year’s pinnacle.
Although winning an Oscar is what many actors wait for their entire lives, it doesn’t immediately fix their careers overnight or ensure that they start getting more work, such that Winslet faced a rocky few years after winning for The Reader, which received a significant amount of backlash, but she found herself in the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ race once more when she appeared in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs biopic starring Michael Fassbender.
An amusing aspect of the campaigning process is that it’s often that nominated stars are asked to weigh in on other movies, and so Winslet also took the time to praise another film that was in the running with her, saying, “I absolutely loved Spotlight. I thought it was extraordinary on every level”.
Rachel McAdams was also nominated in the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ category, meaning voters had to choose between Winslet and her in Spotlight, but actors don’t always see campaigning as a brutal process in which they are trying to tear each other down, and Spotlight was a film that the industry came to rally around.
The film was based on the extraordinary true story of the Boston Globe reporters who investigated the history of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church in Boston, which ended up leading to a global reckoning with the pitfalls of blind faith and a powerful system’s ability to cover up crimes against children.
As gripping and distressing as the material was, the brilliant make of Spotlight immediately sparked comparisons with classics like All the President’s Men and Network, deeming it in their similar vein of mirroring the kind of research and development that goes into building breaking news.
Winslet was clearly not alone in her affection for the film, as Spotlight ended up winning ‘Best Picture’, even within a lineup where it was competing against much more popular, successful films like The Revenant, The Martian, and Mad Max: Fury Road, being particularly raved about among actors, as it featured a real ensemble without a true lead.
The collective cast consisted of a few actors with whom Winslet had worked before on other projects, including Mark Ruffalo in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stanley Tucci in A Little Chaos, and Liev Schreiber in Movie 43, and while she had never worked with McAdams, they both ended up losing ‘Best Supporting Actress’ to Alicia Vikander in The Danish Girl.
