Daniel Day-Lewis. Tommy Lee Jones. Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Sally Field. Tim Blake Nelson. Hal Holbrook. James Spader. John Hawkes. Steven Spielberg has officially pointed his bat at the far bleachers when it comes to casting his upcoming film Lincoln. It’s telling when the Oscar talk can begin fairly nonchalantly during the casting phase. We already knew that Sally Field was set to play Mary Todd Lincoln and Daniel Day-Lewis would don the top hat and beard to play the iconic 16th President. Now, according to LA Times Blog, Jones has joined the cast as abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens and Gordon-Levitt is on board as Lincoln’s son. While The Conspirator focused on the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, Spielberg’s take will look at slavery from the view point of Lincoln and his political advisers. It now has one hell of a cast and no vampire hunting in sight.

Let’s say you’re a greasy-haired young man of the 1930s, on the cusp of completing your Ivy League studies in veterinary medicine (which is apparently animal doctoring and not war fighter doctoring), when tragedy strikes. Your whole life is stolen away. Your first instinct is to hop on the first train out of town, right? Of course it is. That’s exactly what happens to young Jacob (Robert Pattinson) in Water For Elephants. He loses his parents (the only family he has) and jumps aboard a train in the dark of night only to find out he’s accidentally joined the circus. He proves his worth enough to stay by impressing the iron-fisted ring master August (Christoph Waltz), but he ends up impressing August’s wife, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), a bit too much, and the elephant pile gets higher just in time for the company to buy an elephant meant to save all of them.

Every week, Landon Palmer and Cole Abaius log on to their favorite chat client of 1996 as CriterionCollector85 and JP2themax in order to discuss some topical topic of interest. This week, they puzzle over how to define a Best Supporting Role. What does that support mean? Or look like? Does it matter how long someone is on screen or how big a catalyst they are? Since the Oscars don’t seem to know…what the hell is a supporting role anyway?

“I have the feeling that if I died in the middle of the night they’d just roll me out and roll the next one in,” says Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) in That Evening Sun. “And nobody would even notice.”