Ann dowd leads our Oscar chances for “Mass” (watch the trailer above). She is the first favorite to win the award for Best Supporting Actress, according to the combined predictions of thousands of Gold Derby users. If she wins, it would be the fitting end of a story that has been brewing for nearly 10 years. In 2012, she had to fund her own Best Supporting Actress campaign for his role in the independent film “Compliance”. Better late than never.

“Compliance” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012, which was followed by a general public release in August. The movie played Dream Walker as a fast food employee and Dowd as a manager, who is tricked by a prankster on the phone to cruelly torment the employee. Dowd’s performance was acclaimed, but its distributor, Magnolia Pictures, didn’t have the budget for an Oscar campaign, so Dowd footed the bill to send screens to the academy on her own.

Dowd did not end with an Oscar nomination for “Compliance,” but she won the National Board of Review’s Best Supporting Actress award and received nominations for the Critics Choice Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and to various other regional critic groups. But even without Oscar, I would say she won in the long run. The following years were Dowd’s decade with major television roles in “Olive Kitteridge”, “Masters of Sex”, “The Leftovers” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” (for which she won an Emmy) and on Grand screen in “Captain Fantastic”, “Hereditary” and now “Mass”, which follows two couples facing a tragedy that binds them.

Seven of the expert journalists we interviewed are currently betting on Dowd to win: Thelma adams (Golden Derby), Joyce Eng (Golden Derby), Tim gray (Variety), Perri nemiroff (collider), Christophe rosen (Golden Derby), Sacha’s Stone (Daily rewards), and Susan wloszczyna (Golden Derby). So while the Oscars weren’t accepted for “Compliance”, Dowd’s courageous investment in his own career has increasingly paid off.

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