Oscars 2016: Your Complete Guide to the Academy Award Nominees

2016 Oscars

No one was sure who would be nominated — and not everyone was thrilled — but when Chris Rock hosts the 88th annual Academy Awards on Feb. 28, a whopping 57 films will be represented. So to help you prep for the least predictable Oscar race in recent memory, we've got your inside scoop on who's been nominated and why, plus a look back at a few of our favorite surprise wins.

Mad Max: Fury Road

BEST PICTURE

Directed by: George Miller

Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne

Sprung from the mind of George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road represents the culmination of the director's singular vision and his decades-long career. His motivation was both simple and radical: create an end-to-end chase that propels the audience straight into the action — without exposition or explanation — and then expect them to catch up. Populated by a primitive society with its own rituals and language, the film becomes an allegory for the downfall of totalitarian male-dominated societies, anchored by a dominant female character unmatched since Ripley in Alien.

No other film in the race had a longer gestation. Delayed by 9/11, studio shifts, and global warming, Fury Road didn't get off the ground until it moved production from Australia and began filming in Namibia in 2012. "Given that it was such a tough film to make, I'm quite comfortable in saying it's way better than it had a right to be," Miller says. He eschewed CG for practical effects whenever possible, upping the budget and the risk. "It didn't feel like everybody was going to set every day," he says. "It felt like we were going into the wasteland: real vehicles with real assailants after you." And now, real acclaim. —Nicole Sperling

Spotlight

BEST PICTURE

Directed by: Tom McCarthy

Starring: Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams

Spotlight, the story of the team of Boston Globe journalists who uncovered the breadth of the pedophilia scandal within the Catholic Church, is a small miracle of a film. It entertains while it informs, turning the intricate, and often mundane, practice of investigative journalism into riveting cinema. Much of the credit goes to director Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), who, along with coscreenwriter Josh Singer, researched the paper's Spotlight Team, and their work, to create a world that felt authentic. "Neither Josh nor I are journalists," McCarthy says. "And in any industry, there's a certain culture, certain politics, the inside-baseball chatter of it all. We wanted to get that right."

They did. From the worn office furniture and cramped desks to the tedium of shoe-leather reporting and the emotional burden of knowing something you can't quite yet prove, the film pulses with an energy and an authenticity that almost approaches documentary. Few films have gotten the culture and context of newspaper journalism this right. "It's a really, really hard thing to pull off, and Tom did it," says Michael Keaton, who plays Spotlight Team leader Walter "Robby" Robinson. "That to me is the greatest accomplishment of the movie." — Nicole Sperling, with additional reporting by Devan Coggan

The Martian

BEST PICTURE

Directed by: Ridley Scott

Starring: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Mara

It really shouldn't be so entertaining: Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is an astronaut left behind by his crewmates after a storm on Mars. He finds himself alone on the Red Planet without enough food to survive until another ship might reach him. Yet in the able hands of director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard, The Martian — much like the Andy Weir book it's adapted from — is thrilling, funny, moving, and, yes, fun. "It's very optimistic," says Damon. "Ridley and I agreed we didn't want to lose this sense of terror, the idea of being millions of miles away from anybody else, and Mark has a number of problems he has to solve." It's Watney's problem solving — including using human waste as fertilizer to grow potatoes — that has entranced audiences, to say nothing of the heartwarming idea of countries working together (well) to bring him home. "If he panics, he'd be dead," Scott says. "The optimism is fun. Great fun, actually." Agreed. — Sara Vilkomerson

The Revenant

BEST PICTURE

Directed by: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy

Coming off his Best Picture win for Birdman, director Alejandro G. Iñárritu was on a quest to turn a simple, primarily nonverbal story about a man's journey of survival and redemption into an immersive and visceral cinematic experience. "It was a mecca, a voyage, a biblical tale he wanted to experience," says star Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the film's protagonist, Hugh Glass. "When a director of that caliber asks you to go on a journey like this, you jump."

The end result is notable for its shocking — and often shockingly beautiful — imagery of seemingly uninhabited wilderness and for its raw, primal performances from Oscar nominees DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, which throb with urgency. Central to that urgency is a bear attack that has begun to take on an almost mythic status among cineasts, in part because Iñárritu and his team have declined to discuss how they did it. The bear, for the record, is completely digital, but you'd never know it. "You feel like you're watching something you shouldn't be watching," DiCaprio says. "The way they integrated the breath of the animal, the sweat, the blood, the tense moments of silence where she's sniffing around wondering what to do next, you are really on the edge of your seat." — Nicole Sperling

Room

BEST PICTURE

Directed by: Lenny Abrahamson

Starring: Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay

Fellow Best Picture nominees The Revenant and The Martian focus on characters abandoned in vast, unrepentant environments. Room, meanwhile, happens in no less cruel and isolating a place — namely, the tiny shed in an Ohio backyard that serves as a prison for a kidnapping victim (Brie Larson) and her born-in-captivity son (Jacob Tremblay). Novelist Emma Donoghue, nominated for her screenplay, was inspired in part by the grotesque case in Austria of a man who trapped and impregnated his daughter for decades in a bunker. Yet despite the subject matter, both the book and director Lenny Abrahamson's film focus on the shards of life-affirming light within the hopeless dark. "I approached the book with trepidation," Abrahamson says. "But because the story is told through the little boy, and because he's so protected by his mother, what you get is this wondrous voice as opposed to grim horror. And as a director and as a father, I wanted to tell a universal story about parenting and childhood which has a deeply uplifting meaning." — Joe McGovern

Bridge of Spies

BEST PICTURE

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance

The true story of an American attorney (Tom Hanks) brokering a deal to trade a captured Soviet spy (Mark Rylance) for a downed U.S. spy-plane pilot came with high personal stakes for Steven Spielberg. As a kid growing up in the early 1960s, he was certain the Cold War would bring about the end of the world through nuclear annihilation. "It was in my bones to tell this story," he says. "There's so much about it that has to do with personal integrity, and how do you live with yourself, and what's the best way to live with yourself." He reckons that the kind of quiet heroism found in this true-life story may be one reason the world didn't end in a fireball. "We're still here," he says.

Integrity is a tricky commodity in a story packed with spies, diplomats, and politicians. "They're all performing," Spielberg says. "It's very, very hard to know what people really believe, because everybody has an agenda. Everybody has something they don't want to tell us. And that's part of the entire genre of the spy movie. You don't know who is telling the truth or what their intentions are, and you're not supposed to know that. You're just supposed to be along for the ride." — Anthony Breznican

The Big Short

BEST PICTURE

Directed by: Adam McKay

Starring: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt

Author Michael Lewis is three-for-three. Adaptations of his books — Moneyball, The Blind Side, and now The Big Short — have all scored Best Picture nominations. For this unflinching look at the avarice that led to the 2008 financial collapse, director/co-writer Adam McKay focused on the misfit savants who predicted the meltdown. "That's what drew me to it, this idea that we picked the wrong heroes," he says. "The people we need to be listening to are the ones who don't make eye contact, the ones with bad haircuts." The film premiered just as presidential campaigns heated up. "The financial system is still unstable," he says. "So long as we keep electing Congress and presidents that take money from banks, you're going to see a Washington, D.C., that's bought and paid for." — Jeff Labrecque

Brooklyn

BEST PICTURE

Directed by: John Crowley

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson

The tale of Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey in 1950s New York City isn't an unfamiliar one, but spun by novelist Colm Tóibín in 2009, its lyrical tone struck a chord with more than a million readers worldwide. So when screenwriter Nick Hornby and director John Crowley decided to bring the story to the screen, they knew they'd need to guard against melodrama. It is, after all, the story of a homesick woman (Saoirse Ronan) struggling between a life with an exciting boy in her adopted home and returning to Ireland to settle into a slightly better version of the life she's always known. For Crowley, the antidote was to lock into the characters' quietest moments. "They were the essence of the film for me," he says. "It's very satisfying in the editing room to distill the script down to where a look, a glance, a moment resonates." And who better to let his camera linger on than Ronan, who commands the screen with a quiet, dignified grace? "There were a few early shooting days where I would leave a few shots a bit longer on Saoirse's face," he says. "You look back at it and think, God, that's so great." — C. Molly Smith

Brie Larson

BEST ACTRESS

Starring in: Room

Age: 26

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: An abducted woman named Joy who creates a world inside a tiny shed for her son (Jacob Tremblay), but faces difficulty adjusting to her normal life after being freed

Breaking out has two meanings for Brie Larson. It's what her character in Room does after being held in a shed for seven years—and it's what has happened to her career in the wake of the movie's release. At just 26, Larson has been acting for two-thirds of her life, but it was her 2013 lead as a foster-home supervisor in the indie Short Term 12 that grabbed the attention of Room director Lenny Abrahamson, who cast her as his film's strong but traumatized kidnapping survivor. "There's a tremendous dignity about Brie," he says, "but she's also very candid. In her performance you can also see the teenager that her character was when she was taken, which is so crucial in the second half of the film." For Larson, the parallels between her character's journey and her own have now been thrown into high relief. "The story has so much to do with this beautiful allegory with growing up, of being young and living in a small space and seeing things in black and white," she says. "It takes courage, when the moment happens, to step outside this small space into a world that's bigger and more complex. That's exactly what's happening in my own life." — Joe McGovern, with additional reporting by Nina Terrero

Saoirse Ronan

BEST ACTRESS:

Starring in: Brooklyn

Age: 21

Oscar Past: 1 Nom, 0 Wins

Role Call: Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant navigating her new life — and love — in 1950s New York

For most of Brooklyn, Saoirse Ronan captures her character's heartache over leaving her homeland for America with the subtlest of glances and quietest of movements. Her performance — charming, delicate, and nuanced — rises from her deep connection to the character. "This story is very much part of my history," says Ronan, whose parents moved to New York in the '80s before returning to their native Ireland to raise their family. "It was all so close to who I was." The actress, who earned her first Oscar nomination at 13 for Atonement, says this familiarity posed some unique problems — and anxieties. "It was the first time I had felt actual fear going into a project," she says. "I couldn't hide behind some other world that I was becoming a part of or disappear into a completely different character than who I am." — Nina Terrero

Cate Blanchett

BEST ACTRESS

Starring in: Carol

Age: 46

Oscar Past: 6 Noms, 2 Wins

Role Call: Carol Aird, an upper-class woman in the early 1950s who embarks on a love affair with an inexperienced shopgirl named Therese (Rooney Mara)

It was her minor role in 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, that inspired Blanchett to pick up an earlier, lesser-known paperback by the author, The Price of Salt. That 1952 book — which was so ahead of its time that Highsmith penned it under a pseudonym (and later retitled it Carol) — would provide the actress, 16 years after she first read it, with one of the defining roles of her career. "In the novel Carol was so enigmatic and remote and unknowable, as most objects of desire are," Blanchett says. "The film has a much more delicate, beautifully balanced perspective between Carol and Therese, but the interesting challenge for me was to still make Carol all of those elusive things while also depicting the quiet, private hell that she's living in." Director Todd Haynes praises her commitment to embodying characters so deeply that she almost becomes mistaken for them. "Watching her as Carol, you might think that the character is strongly relevant to her," he says. "But in reality she's nothing like Carol. Cate doesn't have any of that mercurial fog or those neuroses. She does seem to know, though, about playing the object of desire." — Joe McGovern

Jennifer Lawrence

BEST ACTRESS

Starring in: Joy

Age: 25

Oscar Past: 3 Noms, 1 Win

Role Call: A single mother who hurdles the obstacles to become a matriarch and entrepreneur

For her third outing with David O. Russell — following 2012's Silver Linings Playbook and 2013's American Hustle — Jennifer Lawrence knew to expect the unexpected when it came to working with her renegade director. "I didn't even bother reading the script," she admits. "I never remember to read lines anyway — I always forget that's part of my job — because things would change the night before and then again the next day." She laughs. "It would kill David to make a movie the normal way."

Based loosely on real-life entrepreneur Joy Mangano — creator of, among other inventions, the best-selling Miracle Mop — Joy can credit the lion's share of its pulse and energy to Lawrence, who appears in just about every scene and, over the course of 123 minutes, hits every conceivable emotional beat. "It's about the business, it's about the heart, it's about the family, and it's about the woman — and not about a mop," she says. "Thank God, because I'm not a good mopper." — Sara Vilkomerson

Charlotte Rampling

BEST ACTRESS

Starring in: 45 Years

Age: 69

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: Kate, a retired teacher who unlocks game-changing secrets about her husband (Tom Courtenay) on the eve of the couple's 45th wedding anniversary

Andrew Haigh's marriage drama 45 Years is a movie of unspoken words, its air heavy with cold pockets of stillness, and that's just the way Charlotte Rampling likes it. "When I read the script," she recalls, "I was like, 'Well, here we go. This suits me.'" Indeed it did. Just weeks shy of her 70th birthday, the British star of The Night Porter, The Verdict, and Swimming Pool has her first Oscar nomination — and it's a sweeter treat considering that she earned it on her own terms. Her performance as Kate is a majestic showcase of her mercifully un-Botoxed face and the power of her melancholy smile. "The recognition is very touching to me because it's for what I've always wanted to do," she says. "I always wanted to get down and down and down into myself. I wanted that to be my journey through the acting world." — Joe McGovern

Leonardo DiCaprio

BEST ACTOR

Starring in: The Revenant

Age: 41

Oscar Past: 5 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: Hugh Glass, a 19th-century frontiersman who is left for dead, only to make his way across the plains in a quest for revenge

Between stuffing himself inside a horse carcass, chowing down on bison liver, and immersing himself in freezing water, no one suffered more for his craft this year than Leonardo DiCaprio. But his primary motivation to play fur trapper Hugh Glass didn't stem from a penchant for masochism, he says. He was most interested by the challenge of portraying a character who barely speaks. "I've played a lot of vocal characters in the past, so this was something I really wanted to investigate: how to convey Glass' complex emotions with very little dialogue."

DiCaprio succeeded thanks to a close collaboration with director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, whose commitment to shooting the entire film in natural light required his star to practice each scene in excruciating detail so he could nail it quickly when the cameras rolled. And because DiCaprio is on screen alone for most of the film, his wardrobe — in particular, a bear hide — became a narrative talisman, of sorts. "It was always about the bear fur," he says. "What happened to the fur through the movie — when I put it on, when I lost it — always represented Hugh Glass' arc." — Nicole Sperling

Eddie Redmayne

BEST ACTOR

Starring in:The Danish Girl

Age: 34

Oscar Past: 1 Nom, 1 Win

Role Call: Danish painter Lili Elbe, one of the world's first known recipients of gender-confirmation surgery

For a decade, he's been the epitome of a hardworking actor. (You might have first seen him in 2006 as the son of fellow Best Actor nominee Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd.) But in the past 18 months, Eddie Redmayne has cemented himself as the cinematic heir to Daniel Day-Lewis. His Oscar-winning performance as Stephen Hawking in 2014's The Theory of Everything was not simply the pantomiming of a disability for awards bait. Redmayne located the twinkling charisma and effortless charm within the astrophysicist's wrecked body. Now, as Lili Elbe, a transgender woman struggling to understand her identity without destroying her marriage, Redmayne again defines his character not with cosmetics, but through her very female heart. "With Eddie, everything flowed from inside to out," says director Tom Hooper, who also worked with the actor in Elizabeth I and Les Misérables. "The primary concern for him was always Lili's emotional journey, much more than the physical, and that's the incredible work you can see in his performance." His costar Alicia Vikander agrees. "He's such a thoughtful person," she says. "So I never questioned that the film would work with him playing the part." — Joe McGovern

Bryan Cranston

BEST ACTOR

Starring in: Trumbo

Age: 59

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who twice won Oscars while blacklisted for his alleged Communist Party ties

Dalton Trumbo more or less came prepackaged for the biopic treatment. The Roman Holiday writer was both a vocal opponent of the House Un-American Activities Committee — a group of congressmen whose witch hunts plagued Hollywood in the late '40s — and a bird lover who frequently wrote screenplays in his bathtub. Yet Bryan Cranston's portrayal of Trumbo in the film directed by Jay Roach could only have come from the performer who wowed TV viewers for five seasons on Breaking Bad and made them laugh years before on Malcolm in the Middle. "There comes a time, hopefully — that's what every actor wants — when that character sucks into you, and you've ingested it," Cranston says. "You feel that when you read an excerpt from his books or talk to people who knew him; it's now filtered through your version of that character." The transformation is simultaneously all Trumbo and all Cranston, capturing the eccentricities of the Hollywood legend, sifted through the ineffable charisma of the man we once knew as Walter White. — Kevin P. Sullivan

Michael Fassbender

BEST ACTOR

Starring in: Steve Jobs

Age: 38

Oscar Past: 1 Nom, 0 Wins

Role Call: The cofounder of Apple, whose tumultuous relationship with his daughter is woven through his professional life

Michael Fassbender may not look like the Apple cofounder, but that was never the point. For the Aaron Sorkin-scripted biopic — a life in three product launches — Fassbender needed to capture Steve Jobs' spirit and find the human soul behind the Mac daddy. Though he describes his process as "not really doing much" before he starts shooting, Fassbender read and reread and re-reread Sorkin's script to make sure that when it came time to perform the complex pages of fast-paced dialogue in front of director Danny Boyle's cameras, he wouldn't be the one holding production up. "I'd hate to go home having had a bad day because I didn't prepare properly," Fassbender says. "The script dictates a lot by its rhythm, in terms of the character's inner life and objective and psyche. By obeying the rhythm, it actually does a lot of work for you." Turns out the old joke is true: How do you get to the Academy Awards? Practice, practice, practice. — Kevin P. Sullivan

Matt Damon

BEST ACTOR

Starring in: The Martian

Age: 45

Oscar Past: 3 Noms, 1 Win

Role Call: Mark Watney, an astronaut marooned on a planet with only his smarts to help him get home

In The Martian, the mission to rescue astronaut Mark Watney — who is mistakenly left on Mars because his crew believes him dead — becomes a globally watched event. It's a role that requires a hero who is not only appealing enough to almost single-handedly hold a movie audience's attention for two-plus hours but could conceivably seduce an entire planet. "The whole world wants to bring him home. Who is that guy? It's Matt Damon," says costar Jessica Chastain with a laugh. "He's so likable we have to root for him." Veteran director Ridley Scott had been a fan of the actor for some time: "My favorite of Matt's performances is The Talented Mr. Ripley — that one was really special," Scott says. "But anything he does is something I'd like to see." Damon was a Scott fan, too, and the first-time collaborators found that their workingstyles meshed from the start. "Normally I like to wait to rehearse with other actors and see what happens," says Damon. This time he had few scenes with other actors, so "I prepped and showed up and was ready to go. On the first day we shot the first monologue where Mark realizes he's stranded on Mars. It's a two-page speech and we did it in one take. Ridley came blasting onto set and goes, 'Jesus, you and me could do two movies at once!'" Maybe next time? — Sara Vilkomerson

Alejandro G. Iñárritu

BEST DIRECTOR

Director of: The Revenant

Age: 52

Oscar Past: 5 Noms, 3 Wins

He isn't interested in repeating himself, yet every film he's made informs his next. With The Revenant, Alejandro G. Iñárritu took a daring approach — shooting few takes, making minimal cuts, relying on natural light — that wouldn't have happened had he not made his Oscar-winning Birdman first. "I wanted to try to solve things in real time," he says. "It allows people to really submerge themselves into the character's experience, especially if you are shooting from the right point of view. I learned that from Birdman."

He also learned to test his actors' endurance and upped the ante with The Revenant, putting his stars through hours of rehearsal, often in freezing conditions, to capture long takes when the lighting was just right. It was worth it, according to them. "The second I met him, he had such a specific vision for how he wanted the film to look and feel," says Leonardo DiCaprio. Not that his vision was always easy to communicate. "He's unlike any director I've ever worked with," says Tom Hardy. "He sees things how he sees them, so giving him back what he wants is an interesting experience. But I love him so much, I want to know what he wants so I can do it for him." — Nicole Sperling

Lenny Abrahamson

BEST DIRECTOR

Director of: Room

Age: 49

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

The odds were never in Lenny Abrahamson's favor. Five years ago he was the director of just two features, neither of which had made waves outside of his native Ireland, but he wrote a detailed 10-page letter to fellow countrywoman Emma Donoghue, who had written the beloved novel Room about a mother and her son imprisoned in a shed. To make a totally uncompromised film version of her book, Abrahamson pleaded, he should be the director.

Donoghue stalled, but when the director began production on his indie film Frank — featuring boldfaced actor Michael Fassbender as a rock star in a papier-mâché mask — she said yes. "The most satisfying thing for me is that we started from zero and made exactly the film we wanted and achieved all this," Abrahamson says. That's particularly true given that he was considered a dark horse for a nomination. "I was absolutely flummoxed and flabbergasted when I heard my name," he says. "It's wonderful that not everything in life is so predictable." — Joe McGovern

Adam McKay

BEST DIRECTOR

Director of: The Big Short

Age: 47

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

The more you learn about the culture of greed and the willful ignorance that precipitated the 2008 mortgage meltdown, the more you realize that The Big Short needed Anchorman director Adam McKay. Who better to see the farce within the fiasco? "This movie is about a group of people who saw something that our entire culture did not see," says McKay, who was also nominated for co-writing the script. "What were we paying attention to? This pop culture noise that's always around us." Hence a film that stops the plot to have Margot Robbie, in a bubble bath, explain subprime lending. "We knew it was breaking some primary rules of filming," he says. "But you let the story tell you what you have to do. It just felt like that had to be the way." Like his characters, McKay was the oddball who saw the big picture. — Jeff Labrecque

George Miller

BEST DIRECTOR

Director of: Mad Max: Fury Road

Age: 70

Oscar Past: 4 Noms, 1 Win

Nothing is accidental. Not the chrome spray in Nux's mouth, nor the wire skull that adorns Furiosa's steering wheel. When George Miller decided to return to the franchise that launched his career, with Mad Max: Fury Road, he left no detail to chance. "You talk to him about any of the tribes involved, or the vehicles, and they are all characters to him, and they all mean something," says titular star Tom Hardy. "He doesn't bang on about any of it, but it is a meditation on all of his imagery and iconography and symbolism." And it has earned him his first Oscar nod for directing.

Miller prefers to run his sets like a partnership with his cast and crew. "It all felt very collaborative," says costar Charlize Theron. "It's not 'Oh, I've got to listen to her, and I guess I've got to light that scene to make her happy.' It was very authentic and organic." And the film provided Miller the opportunity to match his decades of experience with today's technology, reinvigorating the action genre he helped reinvent more than three decades ago. "I've always been fascinated by any work that has an optimum medium on which to experience it," says Miller. "Fury Road has to be seen in a cinema; the experience would be diminished at home. In many ways, it's got to be there, with the congregation of people in the dark." — Nicole Sperling

Tom McCarthy

BEST DIRECTOR

Director of: Spotlight

Age: 49

Oscar Past: 1 Nom, 0 Wins

Digging through old news clippings and legal documents may not sound gripping, but when director-screenwriter Tom McCarthy and his coscribe, Josh Singer, decided to tackle The Boston Globe's investigation into sex abuse in the Catholic Church, they knew the key was to emulate the journalists themselves and stick to the facts. "There was a lot of drama inherent in the story, and we just had to capture it as honestly as possible," McCarthy says. "Hopefully, we did that." And, like all journalists, they were aided by their sources. "The Globe reporters were incredibly helpful and generous with their time, not only through countless interviews and conversations over two and a half years, but by reading multiple drafts of the screenplay and really breaking it down bit by bit," he says. The result is a film that succeeds as both a riveting procedural and a call to arms for keeping local papers alive. "We wanted to make sure we captured the heart and courage of the survivors and the journalists," McCarthy says. "To get a favorable response from them is as important to me as anything." — Devan Coggan

Alicia Vikander

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Starring in: The Danish Girl

Age: 27

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: Gerda Wegener, the Danish painter and supportive wife of the first known recipient of gender confirmation surgery, Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne)

On April 29, 2014, Sweden native Alicia Vikander was best known as the star of the 2012 Danish art-house hit A Royal Affair, an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. She had already wrapped shooting on Testament of Youth and Ex Machina, and her career was undoubtedly on the rise — but on that afternoon, as she was riding a train in the London Underground, her instant reaction to reading a newspaper item about the movie version of David Ebershoff's novel The Danish Girl was "Wow, that's gonna turn out to be great." The article said that Tom Hooper was going to direct Eddie Redmayne in the lead role. "And I'm not kidding," Vikander says with a bemused laugh, "two days after that my agent called and said they were casting for Gerda."

Researching the part afforded Vikander an education in both trans rights and love. "I read a book called My Husband's a Woman Now by Leslie Hilburn Fabian and she was generous enough to talk on the phone with me," the actress says. "And it was a revelation to see that, with anyone who you're close to, it is very much the two people who go through this change together. That's something I really listened to and was very moved by. I'm glad it's such a part of our film." — Joe McGovern

Kate Winslet

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Starring in: Steve Jobs

Age: 40

Oscar Past: 6 Noms, 1 Win

Role Call: Joanna Hoffman, Apple's head of marketing and moral compass to company cofounder Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender)

An actor can take on a role for any number of reasons: wanting to work with a director she admires, or to elevate a script she loves. Or maybe the film is shooting in Hawaii. But Kate Winslet accepted the part of Joanna Hoffman largely because it scared her. "If you know how to play a role, then where's the challenge and where's the fun?" Winslet says. "I read the script, and I thought, 'God, I actually have no idea where to begin with this.'" Not only would she be performing Aaron Sorkin's tech-heavy, rapid-fire dialogue, but she would be doing it in a polyglot accent that reflected Hoffman's Polish and Armenian upbringing. She needn't have worried, though. Winslet delivers a cool counterweight to the gravitational force of Michael Fassbender's fiery Steve Jobs. She balances his tunnel vision with her broad view, his drive with her strategy. And like their real-life counterparts, neither could have succeeded without the other. — Kevin P. Sullivan, with additional reporting by Darren Franich

Rooney Mara

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Starring in: Carol

Age: 30

Oscar Past: 1 Nom, 0 Wins

Role Call: Therese Belivet, a forlorn 1950s department-store clerk who falls in love with an older woman (Cate Blanchett)

Stillness can be just as intimidating as acting up a storm, something Rooney Mara admits was on her mind when she joined Todd Haynes' period drama Carol, replacing Mia Wasikowska in the role of a shopgirl with a complete lack of vocabulary for what she's experiencing — in her case, romantic attraction to a mysterious older woman. "I loved the script but was worried that there wasn't enough for me to do or that I wouldn't be bringing enough to it," Mara explains. Fortunately, being enamored with her costar helped. "I've looked up to Cate Blanchett since I saw Elizabeth when I was 13," Mara says. "And as soon as I had Cate on the other side as the person I was reacting to, a lot of things made more sense." — Joe McGovern

Rachel McAdams

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Starring in: Spotlight

Age: 37

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: Sacha Pfeiffer, a writer for The Boston Globe whose investigation into the Catholic Church child-abuse scandal unearths her complicated relationship to her family religion

Rachel McAdams plays a woman who is equal parts determined journalist and loyal granddaughter of a devout Catholic. Her portrayal of reporter Sacha Pfeiffer was so effective at adding emotional depth to a complex story of reporters striving to unearth a cover-up in the church, that director Tom McCarthy and his coscreenwriter Josh Singer just kept adding more lines and scenes for her while they were shooting. "She was so good at taking our last-minute rewrites and turning them into gold," Singer says. "I kept saying to her, 'The problem is that you give us no incentive to stop doing this because you're so good at it.' Everything we threw at her, she literally could learn stuff within minutes." Those moments turned out to be some of the most affecting in the film, says her costar Michael Keaton. "The scenes that always get me the most are the ones with Rachel, where she hasn't told her grandmother yet and she knows her grandmother is going to find out all this information from the church, knowing how much that is going to hurt," he says. "That's a huge thing, and those are the scenes that — without Rachel saying a word — move me the most." — Nicole Sperling, with additional reporting by Devan Coggan

Jennifer Jason Leigh

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Starring in: The Hateful Eight

Age: 53

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: Daisy Domergue, the battered outlaw shackled to Kurt Russell's bounty hunter and trapped in a snowed-in cabin with seven suspicious men

Quentin Tarantino didn't write the role for her, but with Daisy Domergue, the conniving fugitive, Jennifer Jason Leigh sure makes it seem like he had. Feral, funny, and bloodthirsty, Daisy is a deadly hillbilly playfully jabbering with her captor one moment, then singing a ballad foreshadowing his doom the next. "It had been a long time since I had anything that made me really want to lose myself in a character, and [Daisy] demanded that of me," she says. "Acting is something I loved so much, but I had sort of forgotten about it." No one will forget Daisy's bloody visage in the film's final chapter, and Leigh has earned her stripes as a Tarantino player: "I would love nothing more than just to work with him forever and ever." — Jeff Labrecque

Sylvester Stallone

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Starring in: Creed

Age: 69

Oscar Past: 2 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: Rocky Balboa, who gets a second wind when he mentors a young boxer (Michael B. Jordan), the son of his friend and rival Apollo Creed

We've seen Sylvester Stallone play Rocky Balboa in seven films, but something about his performance in Creed is different. Not only is he cast in a supporting role, but his Rocky has been wounded, both by blows in the ring and by the cruelty of time. His friends are gone. His wife, Adrian, has died. And he's been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The former heavyweight hero is now a defeated champion living among ghosts. It's shocking, heartbreaking to watch, and it's a version of the Italian Stallion that Stallone initially resisted. "He wasn't sure that audiences wanted to see Rocky that vulnerable," admits director Ryan Coogler. "And that was an uphill battle for him. It took some time for Sly to wrap his head around that, but once he did, he did it totally."

One of Stallone's most poignant and heartfelt scenes depicts the moment when Rocky is diagnosed by his doctor and decides to reject treatment. "The hospital shoot was tough," Coogler says. "We were pressed for time, and I remember on that day we had to move really fast. I only had one camera in that small hospital room. I did a push-in on Sly's face, and on the first take he nailed it. Something felt so special and so real about it." — Tim Stack, with additional reporting by Joe McGovern

Mark Ruffalo

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Starring in: Spotlight

Age: 48

Oscar Past: 2 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: Reporter Michael Rezendes who, with his Boston Globe colleagues, exposed the cover-up of pedophile priests

As dogged journalist Michael Rezendes, Mark Ruffalo brims with righteous, kinetic energy as he races around the streets of Boston, tireless in his quest to discover the truth. "He vibrates through the entire movie," says director Tom McCarthy. That physicality also represents the actor's personal commitment to getting the film made. "Mark really is the heart and soul of Spotlight in a lot of ways," says coscreenwriter Josh Singer. "He was the first guy to sign on board, he was the first one to say, 'This is an important movie. It's a story we need to tell.'" And for those who know the real-life Rezendes, the resounding consensus is that Ruffalo nailed both the man's physical nuances and his character traits without turning the performance into a caricature, Singer says: "He's really got him down in a way that is subtle and wonderful." — Nicole Sperling, with additional reporting by Devan Coggan

Tom Hardy

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Starring in: The Revenant

Age: 38

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: John Fitzgerald, the fur trapper and survivalist who abandons Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the wilderness mid-expedition

The production of The Revenant has been described by everyone involved as a painful endurance test. For Tom Hardy it was an exercise he says he would have failed had he not spent six arduous months in the deserts of Namibia filming Mad Max: Fury Road. "If I hadn't done Mad Max and hadn't had a good taste of being powerless, and not knowing what was going on, and then seeing the results and going, 'Oh my God, I get it,' I couldn't have done this," he says.

As the amoral John Fitzgerald, Hardy makes a murderous decision in an effort to save himself after his fellow trapper, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), is mortally wounded by a bear. But Hardy doesn't like to label him a bad guy — or judge him outside the context of the era in which he lived. "I try and avoid making sweeping generalizations about a character," says the London native. "John makes the executive decision to not bring Glass back because he's a liability. [Glass'] son is screaming and drawing attention to the three of them, so he offs the son as well. It's not nice. It's not very palatable. But it was a brutal place back then." — Nicole Sperling

Mark Rylance

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Starring in: Bridge of Spies

Age: 56

Oscar Past: 0 Noms, 0 Wins

Role Call: Real-life Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who was captured by the U.S. and offered in trade for a downed American pilot

"I think I reveal more of myself when I pretend to be someone else," says Mark Rylance, a three-time Tony winner who has spent most of his career on the stage. So embodying a stoic Soviet sleeper agent held in U.S. custody, in Steven Spielberg's Cold War espionage drama, wasn't much of a stretch for the actor, who says he immediately drew parallels to his own career — and, indeed, acting in general. "There is something alike in the objective of our two businesses," he says. "The twofold consciousness that actors and spies work with: pretending to be one thing while being fully aware you're another." — Anthony Breznican

Christian Bale

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Starring in: The Big Short

Age: 41

Oscar Past: 2 Noms, 1 Win

Role Call: Dr. Michael Burry, the hedge-fund manager who saw the flaws of the housing market and made millions betting on its collapse

Director Adam McKay won Christian Bale over with a rather simple pitch: "It's not often that we get to see an introvert as a hero." Michael Burry was a brilliant numbers cruncher who recognized the looming financial crisis while Wall Street stuck its collective head in the sand. Socially awkward, with a whiff of Asperger's, Burry worked in solitude — an acting challenge that the übercommitted Bale couldn't resist. He wore Burry's clothes, emulated his breathing, and mimicked his office routines. "It turns out Burry would do push-ups, play heavy metal, and walk in different patterns," says McKay. "So that office really became his mind, and once we got that, it became incredibly exciting. Suddenly, you're really getting to just watch someone's mind work." Bale invites you inside while simultaneously maintaining a distance, a coolness that is essential to the character. Burry was always three steps ahead; so is Bale. — Jeff Labrecque