LOS ANGELES _ Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney took home the first acting awards of the night at the 90th Academy Awards on Sunday, for best supporting actor and actress. Rockwell won the Oscar for his performance as a troubled cop in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," while Janney won for her performance as Tonya Harding's mother LaVona in the biopic "I, Tonya."
Both Rockwell and Janney were frontrunners for the awards, having won the supporting performance awards at the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, BAFTAs and Saturday's Independent Spirit Awards. During his acceptance speech, Rockwell mentioned his fellow nominees by name, saying, "You guys rock." He also added at the end of his speech, "This is for my friend, Phil Hoffman," dedicating the award to his friend, the late actor and Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Janney also acknowledged her fellow nominees, but not before first joking, "I did it all by myself." She thanked "I, Tonya" writer Steve Rogers for "the gift of LaVona," as well as, "the cast, crew, and bird that elevated my performance." At the end of her speech, she said, "This is for Hal, you're always in my heart," referring to her late younger brother.
In the interview room backstage, Rockwell was ebullient, and spoke to the two to three months of research he did for his character, Dixon, including dialect coaching, ride-alongs with police and research with skin graft doctors and burn victims to understand his character better. He described Dixon as a combination between "Barney Fife and Travis Bickle," and that the process of creating that character was like cooking "a big souffle or stew."
Rockwell also addressed some of the backlash against "Three Billboards," including that the film redeems his character, a racist cop in small-town Missouri who is accused of police brutality. Rockwell mentioned that both his character and Frances McDormand's character, Mildred, "have a lot of work to do; it's not like they're redeemed at the end of the movie. It's a dark fairy tale of some sorts, in real life we probably would have gone to prison."
Speaking to his friendship with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rockwell said the actor was an old friend, and "an inspiration for my generation... I could go on for an hour about Phil Hoffman, he was a good friend, and a huge, huge inspiration."
