Widescreen: Oscars give Spacey the true definition of a snub

I saw "The Usual Suspects" the weekend it opened at the late Cineplex Odeon Ridge Cinema, the one with the pink neon that shared a parking lot with Portillo's on Dundee Road in Arlington Heights. This was the fall of 1995, so I was 16. Going to the movies was the greatest thing in the world then, and it still was for another decade or so. (Not so much these days. Turn off your dang phone and get off my lawn.)

Kevin Spacey gives a godlike performance in "The Usual Suspects," or at least that's how it felt to a teenager who was just beginning to discover what cinema was capable of thanks to names like Kubrick and Tarantino. As Roger "Verbal" Kint, a career criminal who is secretly manipulating his overconfident interrogator (Chazz Palminteri), Spacey all but willed himself to movie stardom.

A month later, David Fincher's "Seven" arrived in theaters with buzz about a surprise, unbilled star as the villain. I wanted it so badly to be Spacey - and it was. That appearance cemented him as my favorite actor, which he would be for years to come.

Spacey won the supporting-actor Oscar for "Usual Suspects," paving the way for a screen career that hit many highs (another Oscar for "American Beauty," acclaim on TV for "House of Cards") and even more lows ("The Life of David Gale," "Pay It Forward," "21").

And now that career looks to be over, thanks to a series of allegations of sexual misconduct that began in October with "Star Trek: Discovery" actor Anthony Rapp and continued for weeks without denial from Spacey.

That was hammered home by Tuesday's Oscar nominations. You can talk about Tom Hanks getting snubbed all you want, but there is no greater snub ("rebuff, ignore, or spurn disdainfully") from the Academy voters than nominating Christopher Plummer for the role of J. Paul Getty in "All the Money in the World" - a role that had, until six weeks before release, belonged to Spacey. Director Ridley Scott reshot all of Spacey's scenes and replaced him with Plummer in the wake of the allegations.

I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of Academy voters never saw Plummer's performance, let alone thought it was better than, say, Michael Stuhlbarg's turn in "Call Me By Your Name." No, Plummer made the cut, in part, as a message to Spacey.

And that's just fine with me.

I idolized this man, just as I'm sure many of his accusers did. Now I am left to wonder if his sadistic Hollywood executive character from "Swimming With Sharks" was autobiographical.

More Oscar ruminations:

• Roger Deakins was first nominated for the cinematography Oscar for 1994's "The Shawshank Redemption." Twenty-three years later, he's earned his 13th nomination for "Blade Runner 2049" and may finally be poised to win - somehow the man long considered to be the best cinematographer in the business has never earned the gold statue. He couldn't even win against himself: In 2007, he was up for both "No Country For Old Men" (the best-picture winner) and "The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford," which contains maybe the single best shot I've ever seen in a movie. (It's in the train robbery scene.) Robert Elswit won for "There Will Be Blood."

• Speaking of which, director Paul Thomas Anderson's "Phantom Thread" was a minor surprise in the directing, supporting-actress (Lesley Manville) and picture categories. It will lose all three, and Daniel Day-Lewis' final performance before retirement will, too, to Gary Oldman in "Darkest Hour." Anderson is possibly the most skilled, most idiosyncratic American filmmaker. After the success of "Boogie Nights" 20 years ago, he seems to delight in baffling his audience in new and exciting ways every few years. He's nothing short of amazing. He'll probably never win an Oscar.

• "Wonder Woman," one of the biggest and most acclaimed hits of the year, didn't garner a single nomination, not even in technical categories like sound mixing or costume design. That seems impossible. A superhero movie did, however, sneak into the adapted screenplay category; it's extraordinary that "Logan," the umpteenth Wolverine movie, would be recognized for its writing and not its pyrotechnics at Oscar time.

• The best performance I saw last year that wasn't nominated on Tuesday belongs to Allison Williams. Nothing we saw from her on "Girls" or NBC's live "Peter Pan" musical could have prepared us for her role in four-time nominee "Get Out." I won't elaborate further, even 11 months after release, for fear of spoiling too much.

• Sean Stangland is a Daily Herald multiplatform editor. Follow him on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.