Golden Globes 2017: Will John Lithgow, Christian Slater, or Sterling K. Brown win Supporting Actor?
If there’s one thing that we’ve remained infuriated at the Hollywood Foreign Press about for a rather-long time, it is that they’ve inexplicably decided to continue classifying Supporting Actors / Actresses as one giant mass of a Golden Globe category featuring hundreds of different television shows. Basically, you’ve got thousands of people competing for five / sometimes six slots, and there’s a good chance voters don’t have the time to really get a sense of everyone. It’s brutal.
While we’ve made our distaste about that part of the process rather clear, that is not to take away from the achievement that it is for many of these actors to be recognized in this category for the work; the fact that they’ve risen to the top with this sort of hurdle to overcome is all the more impressive.
Below, take a look at the Supporting Actor field, and we’ll have our analysis of it in full to go along with it. Remember, following that you can vote for your own favorite in the poll below! We’ll be back soon to discuss the snubs for the category, which is something that we’ve done for the majority of categories at the show to date. We’ll announce the “winners” of all of our own personal polls throughout the site come Sunday, January 8 before the show airs on NBC.
Supporting Actor – The nominees
Sterling K. Brown, “The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story” (FX)
Hugh Laurie, “The Night Manager” (AMC)
John Lithgow, “The Crown” (Netflix)
Christian Slater, “Mr. Robot” (USA)
John Travolta, “The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story” (FX)
Who will win – This race could end up being rather interesting. For most of the year, Brown has completely swept this category for his take on Christopher Darden, and deservedly so. However, because of the aforementioned rules, this is the first time he’s been up against Slater or Lithgow. The latter in particular could be a threat based on the acclaim for his take on Winston Churchill, but we’re still going with Sterling just because he’s been Golden every step of the way.
Who should win – We do think that Laurie is getting terribly unlucky in terms of timing — he was really quite good in every aspect of “The Night Manager,” but for the most part is being overshadowed by some other contenders in the category. There will be other chances for Slater, and while Travolta was very good in the FX anthology, Brown’s performance was transcendent. We’d personally give him our vote if we were a member of the HFPA, but it’d probably be closer than it’s been for every other Supporting Actor category for him thanks to Lithgow’s presence.