> > I have another issue: why is Jamie Foxx nominated for Best SUPPORTING Actor for Collateral? He was the main character! What's that all about?
>
> Considering his performance was (in my opinion) better than Cruise's (though still not flawless), I was wondering the same thing.

The quality of the performances doesn't really have any impact, except that it got Foxx nominated and not Cruise.

The answer is largely strategical, and it's more or less decided by the studio and/or the potential nominees rather than the Academy itself. If Foxx had been promoted as Best Actor for Collateral, it would diminish his chances at winning Best Actor for Ray.

A similar thing is happening with Clive Owen and Natalie Portman in Closer. The four main characters in that film are played by Owen, Portman, Julia Roberts, and Jude Law. They're all of roughly equal weight in terms of screen time (and, unless I misremember, Owen and Portman actually have a hair *more* screen time than Roberts and Law), but it's a strategic error for the film to go into awards season promoting all four of them for the lead categories (or all four for the supporting categories, for that matter). Then they compete with each other, splitting each other's votes, which does two bad things: (1) it limits the maximum number of acting awards the four of them can pull in to two; (2) it diminishes the chances any of them have to win at all.

It was thought that Owen and Portman would have better chances in the supporting categories, so studios put them in for that, and so far it's been pretty successful. Law and Roberts never got much traction for themselves, so it's possible that Owen and Portman could have managed in the lead categories all right, but the other thing that studios look at is the existing playing field. This year, Portman might still have pulled off a nomination for Best Actress, but the Best Actor field is jam-packed. Paul Giamatti was left out, but not, I wager, because he was found lacking, simply that there were six worthy performances and somebody had to get cut. Clive Owen, in the Best Actor raise, would surely have been a casualty there.

The distinction between the lead and supporting acting categories is pretty blurry, but leaving it up to the studios doing the awards campaigning and the performers themselves seems to make the most sense, because any hard line would be arbitrary.

This sort of thing has happened numerous times before, sometimes sensibly and sometimes not. In 1996, Frances McDormand was nominated for Best Actress for Fargo, despite having less than 30 minutes of screen time, while co-star William H. Macy was nominated for Best Supporting Actor with a hair more than 30 minutes of screen time. Yet an argument can be made for the sense of it: McDormand's character and performance so dominate the film that she becomes the face of it.

On the other side of the coin, so also is Tatum O'Neal the very essence of Paper Moon, for which she won Best Supporting Actress in the 1973 awards. But she's as much in Paper Moon as Jamie Foxx was in Collateral. The decision was probably strategic: someone probably doubted the chances of a juvenile actress competing in the big category.

Three years later, Louise Fletcher won Best Actress for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest despite only having around 12 minutes of screen time. Go figure.