Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy

Bright Ideas is a story about a yuppie couple’s fight to get their toddler into the best preschool, and Ethelyn Friend played a mother who succeeded. The woman is so smug, bitchy and professionally successful that you know she won’t survive the first act. But Friend was riveting while her character lived, a slinking, posing pencil stroke of concentrated loathsomeness. And even playing dead, Friend kept raking in the laughs.