Oscar Watch: Can Holly Hunter and Ray Romano Ride ‘The Big Sick’ to Nominations?

As is generally the custom with Oscar-watchers, we’ve been starved for legitimate contenders to talk about in the first half of the year. Not that the movies haven’t been good, but generally speaking, it is very difficult for a movie released in the first half of the year to survive the awards-season gauntlet to an Oscar nomination. Part of this is self-fulfilling prophecy: movies released in the first half of the year don’t get Oscar nominations so studios don’t release movies with high Oscar hopes in the first half of the year. But part of it is that the kinds of movies released in the first half of the year — broad comedies, action franchises, and low-expectation indies — are not the kinds of movies that Oscar voters gravitate towards.

There are exceptions to this “rule,” of course, which brings us to The Big Sick, the Sundance-approved indie comedy that opened in limited release over the weekend. Written by Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon, and based on their real-life story, The Big Sick is part-romantic comedy and part-family-dramady. In the film, Kumail (playing himself, essentially) is a stand-up comedian in Chicago with a very traditional Pakistani-American family, who begins dating Emily (Zoe Kazan). What initially seems like it’s going to be a rom-com about Kumail having to reconcile his conservative, deeply traditional family life with his new relationship becomes something quite different. It’s still that, of course, but then Emily gets suddenly very sick and needs to be placed into a medical coma, at which point Kumail meets Emily’s parents, played by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. Kumail and Emily had recently split up, so the parents — Hunter’s Beth especially — are fairly hostile to him. The bulk of the movie, then, becomes Kumail and Emily’s parents coming to terms with each other amid this medical crisis. It’s a movie that manages to juggle a lot of story elements and does so with an impressive ease (director Michael Showalter also helmed last year’s Hello, My Name Is Doris).

The Big Sick has been a big hit ever since its Sundance premiere, for several reasons. The primary one being that it’s just plain good. It’s also a movie about a comedian, starring a very well-liked comedian, and if you haven’t noticed, half of your Twitter timeline is comedians. When the comedy community unites behind something, you feel it on social media, and the push for The Big Sick over the last few weeks has been strong. But in terms of the movie itself, one huge strength that’s been mentioned again and again has been the performances of Holly Hunter and Ray Romano as Beth and Terry, Emily’s parents. They change the direction of the film once they enter it, each giving warm, wise, and incredibly watchable performances that are both perfectly sized to the film that they’re in and yet still demand special notice. It shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Romano’s an Emmy-winner whose talents have always been bigger than his CBS sitcom roots. Holly Hunter … well, you certainly shouldn’t need me to remind you of Holly Hunter’s credentials. Four Academy Award nominations, a Best Actress win in 1993 for The Piano, a truly singular actress in every respect. If Hollywood valued her correctly, she probably wouldn’t have had the time to make a movie like The Big Sick, so I suppose the movie industry’s loss is our gain in this sense.

The low rumble of Oscar buzz that comes out of Sundance for certain films should always be taken with a grain of salt, but Hunter and Romano’s performances have been getting the kind of “don’t forget about these” caveats since January. Part of it is the Big Sick love-fest, sure, but when enough people make the same argument, you have to start to wonder: Could Holly Hunter and/or Ray Romano actually get awards attention for a pair of supporting roles in a mid-summer indie rom-com? The performances are 100% worth it, of course, but merit is only a fraction of what goes into an Oscar nomination, and supporting-actor/actress nominations from comedies are straight-up rare. Even when the Oscars deign to recognize comedies, the love doesn’t filter down to the supporting races. Think Meryl Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada nomination while Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci’s excellent supporting performances were snubbed.

Looking at only the last 20 years at the Oscars:

That’s eleven primarily comedic performances since 1997, more or less one every two years. And from this list, you can prune a few off as not being the same circumstances as The Big Sick: Kinnear, Church, Breslin, Arkin, Hill, and Squibb were all in Best Picture nominees, which The Big Sick will probably not be. (If those circumstances change, say via an aggressive campaign by Amazon Studios and some year-end critics-awards support, then the whole ballgame is different.) Cooper, meanwhile, was in a comedy that played in many ways like an avant-garde drama, which gave him an edge. Melissa McCarthy and Robert Downey Jr. were both in big summer blockbusters and gave big performances; The Big Sick made a great per-screen debut on five screens last weekend and will likely be a very solid-moneymaker for an indie, but it’s not destined for Bridesmaids or Tropic Thunder kind of money.

Which leaves us with Joan Cusack and Patricia Clarkson for comparison. And honestly, there’s no comparing Cusack’s histrionic In & Out performance with the quiet turns by Hunter and Romano in The Big Sick. Clarkson in Pieces of April is actually a pretty good fit: tiny indie, gets Sundance attention, accomplished actress. This was Clarkson’s first Oscar nod (she was nominated alongside Holly Hunter’s most recent Oscar nomination, for Thirteen), but she’d been on a hot streak, having gotten a bunch of critics’ awards the year before for Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven. She played a prickly mother in Pieces of April, sick with cancer and wearing a wig. On one level, there’s a degree of Oscar-bait in Clarkson’s character that neither Hunter nor Romano have. But on the other hand: Pieces of April is a terrible movie, and as great as Clarkson is usually, she’s not giving that good of a performance.

So how’d Clarkson nail down that nomination? There are always X factors. Voters had noticed her in a string of performances in other movies, and Pieces of April was the one that got the aggressive campaign. Sometimes it’s just that simple. Holly Hunter is already an Oscar favorite. If Amazon aggressively campaigns her, it’s certainly not crazy to think that she could contend with a performance that’s this strong. Romano might have a tougher road to sell himself as an Oscar type of actor, but he actually gets the more accessible character to play.

It’s going to be a LONG eight months until the Oscars, and a lot of contenders to stand between Hunter, Romano, and a pair of richly deserved nominations. But if The Big Sick can make a dent at the box office and Amazon keeps reminding voters of their performances, romantic-comedy could find a rare Oscar victory once again.