LOS ANGELES, Feb 6, (Agencies): Daniel Day-Lewis is expected to make Hollywood history by winning his third Best Actor Oscar on Feb. 24 but the public is split over who deserves the Best Supporting Actor prize, a Reuters poll showed on Wednesday. Day-Lewis, 55, has already picked up almost every major award this season for playing US President Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s Civil War-era drama “Lincoln” and he is front-runner for the top British BAFTA award on Feb. 10. A Reuters Ipsos poll of 909 Americans found 21 percent thought British-born Day-Lewis, 55, should win and 26 percent said he was most likely to win Best Actor at the Oscars for Lincoln, a role he assumed both off and on set during filming.

He is up against Hugh Jackman, who came second in the Reuters poll for musical “Les Miserables,” Bradley Cooper in the quirky romance “Silver Linings Playbook,” Joaquin Phoenix in cult drama “The Master” and Denzel Washington as an alcoholic pilot in “Flight.” If Day-Lewis does win, he will be the first man to take home the Best Actor statue three times, having won the award in 1990 for playing severely disabled Irish artist Christy Brown in “My Left Foot” and in 2008 for his role as oil prospector Daniel Plainview in “There Will be Blood.”

Granted
But Day-Lewis, who chooses his roles carefully and has only appeared in 10 films in the past 20 years, was not taking a win for granted. It took Spielberg three attempts to persuade him to sign up for the lead role in “Lincoln.” “Members of the Academy love surprises, so about the worst thing that can happen to you is if you’ve built up an expectation,” the actor told reporters after winning the Screen Actors Guild trophy in Los Angeles last week. Bookmakers, however, were not expecting any surprises, with Day-Lewis the clear favorite to win the Best Actor award. But the public was less certain on who would bag the award for Best Supporting Actor from the 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The field of five includes Alan Arkin from Iran hostage drama “Argo,” Robert De Niro as the father in “Silver Linings Playbook,” Philip Seymour Hoffman from “The Master,” Tommy Lee Jones in “Lincoln,” and Christoph Waltz in “Django Unchained.”

The results at awards ceremonies so far this year have been mixed. Jones won at the Screen Actors Guild, Waltz won the Golden Globe, and Seymour Hoffman was chosen Best Supporting Actor at the Critics Choice Movie Awards. Almost half of the respondents to the online poll, conducted Friday through Tuesday, were unsure who should win at the Oscars in the supporting actor category. Some 20 percent chose Jones, while 14 percent picked De Niro as the actor most likely to take home the Oscar. The accuracy of the poll uses a statistical measure called a “credibility interval” and is precise to within 2.8 percentage points. Bookmakers, however, put 66-year-old Jones as the front-runner to win his second Oscar for his role as liberal congressman Thaddeus Stevens in “Lincoln.” He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1994 for “The Fugitive.”

When Oscar nominees such as Steven Spielberg, Hugh Jackman and Helen Hunt want to take a break backstage during the Academy Awards show, they’ll step back in time. Their off-camera Oscar hangout, the Architectural Digest Greenroom, was inspired by art director Cedric Gibbons, who won 11 Academy Awards and was nominated another 28 times for his work on classic films including “The Wizard of Oz,” ‘’Singin’ in the Rain” and “Annie Get Your Gun.” He even designed the Oscar statuette. “He really created, almost singlehandedly, the look of the Hollywood films of the 1930s and ‘40s,” said Madeline Stuart, designer of this year’s Oscar green room. “His body of work is so impressive, and as a designer who prides herself on being able to work in so many different architectural styles, he’s my idol because he, in order to create the sets and the environments and the worlds of these different films, had to be conversant in all these different (aesthetic) languages.”

Upholstered
Stuart’s green room will boast a sunny palette, spare decor, black lacquer floors and the upholstered banquettes Gibbons favored. “This is not a room for flip-flops,” Stuart said. “This is a room that conveys the high style and sophisticated glamor of the 1930s and ‘40s, and how fabulous that the people who are spending time in the room that night will have dressed the part.” Stuart typically decorates and remodels the high-end homes of entertainers and business leaders. The Oscar backstage retreat is her most transient project yet: The entire room is being built off-site and will be moved into the backstage area of the Dolby Theatre a few days before the Academy Awards. And it’ll be gone just as quickly.

“This is like a military maneuver and everything is plotted and planned to within an inch of its life,” Stuart said, adding that the green room closes after the Oscar show, and two days later, “they come and my little world is broken down and carted away.” Still, she’s honored to create a space for stars to steal away during one of Hollywood’s biggest nights and pay homage to one of the industry’s most legendary art directors. But can her green room quell celebrity nerves? “There’s nothing we can do in this room that can make them feel calm and relaxed,” she said, “but we do want to make them feel comfortable and provide a respite from the madness that must be going on backstage.”
 

French actor Jean Dujardin, star of last year’s Oscar-winning movie “The Artist,” will return this year as an Academy Awards presenter, along with his fellow laureates, organizers said Tuesday. Meryl Streep, who won best actress last year, will present awards at this show, as will Octavia Spencer and Christopher Plummer, best supporting actress and best supporting actor respectively. “We are honored to have Meryl, Octavia, Christopher and Jean, last year’s Oscar winners in each of the acting categories, return to the Oscar stage,” said the Feb  24 show’s producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron. Streep is the most Oscar-nominated actor ever with 17 nods, and has won three, including for her role as former British premier Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady.”

Dujardin won best actor on his first nomination, for his role as a silent, black-and-white movie star struggling with the arrival of sound on the big screen. Spencer also won with her first nomination, as a black maid in civil rights drama “The Help,” while Canadian veteran Plummer became the oldest actor ever to win an Oscar, at the age of 82. Steven Spielberg’s presidential drama “Lincoln” has the most nominations for this year’s show, with 12 nods, followed by “Life of Pi” with 11 and “Les Miserables” and “Silver Linings Playbook,” both with eight. But Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage crisis drama “Argo” has won a succession of top prizes in Hollywood’s annual awards season, leading some to tip it as favorite for the coveted best picture, despite only having seven nominations.