But it was Vanessa Redgrave who was up for Howard’s End.Her politics immediately disqualified her. And the other nominees grouped together came nowhere near the viewship who saw My Cousin Vinnie.
Remember that, though actors nominate supporting actors, the entire academy votes on the final award. They probably see the nominated films in a rough proportion to their box office: the bigger the box office, the more likely they’ve seen it. Only a small proportion see all the nominated films; the rest base their votes on the ones they have seen, or on their regard for a particular actor. In 1992, My Cousin Vinnie was most likely seen by the most academy members, and their regard for Vanessa Redgrave was extremely low. Any voter who saw only those two films was highly likely to vote for Tomei.
I agree, with the exception that they probably don’t see the films solely in proportion to the box office, but also in proportion to how many nominations the films receive. Again, this put Davis/Richardson/Plowright at a disadvantage, because they, unlike Redgrave, were in films that got no more than one other nomination, so the chances of Academy members who missed those films first time around catching up with them was lower (and I didn’t forget the Julia scandal; I was just trying to complicate what I saw as a bit of a generalization).
Unless you could mind-read all 600 or whatever members of the Academy, how would you know why they voted as they did? Why would her politics not disqualify her from getting nominated too, then? Elia Kazan (1955) and Jane Fonda (1972) both won Academy Awards despite each having been politically controversial not much earlier.