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Oscars 2015: Where they were then

While we busily filled out our Oscar pool ballots [PDF] around the office, we realized we’ve featured a very high proportion of this year’s nominees on our covers.

It’s almost scary how good our film writers are at predicting who will go far in Hollywood and what veteran actors will add even more nods to their growing list.

[Tonight: Follow @normwilner and @glennsumi as they live-tweet tonight’s festivities at 8:30 pm ET.]

Previously nominated for writing Before Midnight and Before Sunset, Richard Linklater is nominated for three Oscars this year for the outstanding Boyhood. But former NOW editor Cameron Bailey (and current TIFF artistic director) caught up with the director in 2001 when he brought two films to TIFF: Waking Life and Tape.

Speaking of Linklater, Ethan Hawke shared both Linklater’s writing nominations for Before Sunset and Before Midnight, and earned a supporting actor nomination in 2001 for Training Day, and this year, another supporting actor role for Boyhood.

In the mid to late 90s, Norton scared the shit out of us with Oscar-nominated roles like the neo-nazi skinhead in American History X and stuttering accused murderer in Primal Fear. We featured the actor on our cover in 2006 for The Painted Veil.

“American History X, Fight Club, Down In The Valley, 25th Hour, even Keeping The Faith or Larry Flynt those are films totally rooted in my generation’s experience,” Norton told us. “This one is not about that, clearly. It’s taking you away from the now. And yet when period movies are good, they still resonate.”

Now, Norton’s up against Ethan Hawke for the Best Supporting Actor prize for the divisive (we hated it) film Birdman.

It’s about damn time Laura Dern was nominated for something since her last for 1991’s Rambling Rose. Known for her work with David Lynch, Dern’s an indie fave, as shown in our 2004 interview with the California girl:

“It gives you a bigger heart when you have empathy for the people you play, and that inspires you to play hard people, people that are much more complicated than you might have felt safe to play years before,” she told us.

In 2007, we traced Mark Ruffalo’s reputation as the hot guy in female-centered films to his breakout role in Zodiac as the SFPD’s lead homicide detective which wasn’t his first ‘serious’ film, but the first one people seemed to notice him in.

He’s come a long way since then, earning a Best Support Actor nomination for The Kids Are All Right in 2010. This year, he joins the tight competition among the Best Supporting Actor nominees, in his case for Foxcatcher.

“The first movie I remember seeing is The Jerk, followed very closely by Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Ferris Bueller,” Emma Stone told us in 2010, when she was promoting Easy A. I’ve seen them probably hundreds of times. We used to watch them every day. I actually had the fuck’ monologue from Planes, Trains & Automobiles memorized by the time I was, like, nine – to the dismay of my mother and the delight of my father.”

2015’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is Stone’s first of what we think will be many more to come.

When we caught up with Meryl Streep in 2011, she had already won two Academy Awards for 1979’s Kramer Vs. Kramer and 1982’s Sophie’s Choice and was about to win another for her controversially human take on Margaret Thatcher.

“It’s a subversive act to make a movie about an old woman,” she told us. “No one’s interested in that.”

She has been nominated for more Oscars now than anyone else, with a total of 19 nominations. This year, she’s up for her Best Supporting Actress for her role as the the witch in Into the Woods.

“Let’s face it, we’re all eventually going to not be here, and none of us really knows when,” Steve Carell told NOW’s Norm Wilner in 2012 when he was promoting Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. “It makes you ask how you want to live, how to live without regret, how to embrace [life], how to feel it. Which is incredibly important to me in my own personal life, to try to live in the moment, enjoy family and friends and career and just embrace what we have.”

We may want to take these thoughts to heart this year, Carell earned his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his role in Foxcatcher not bad for a guy who started his acting career as a correspondent doing fake news on The Daily Show.

The Judge is not an outstanding movie, but Robert Duvall’s place in it certainly is, earning him a Best Supporting Actor nom to add to the other five Academy Award nominations he has already (including a win for 1983’s Tender Mercies).

This past fall, Duvall revealed his theory of acting to us, which you may find surprising:

“You gotta be you underneath,” he said. “That’s the secret. That’s what Brando was so good at. You just gotta jump in and do it, you know. Just see where it goes, like how we’re talking and listening, listening and talking. Go from there.”

Joining Steve Carell in the competition for this year’s Best Actor award, Benedict Cumberbatch was also our pick for this year’s TIFF cover for his role as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game.

“Often, as an actor, you draw on your own experience or memories, but I really didn’t have to here,” he told NOW’s Glenn Sumi. “He got under my skin. It was just so pitiful. Imagining the physical weakness, the vulnerability, the exhaustion, how the hormones affected his emotional state…. It was all ungovernable.”

Tonight: Follow @normwilner and @glennsumi as they live-tweet tonight’s festivities at 8:30 pm ET.

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