2024 Oscar Predictions: Best Supporting Actor and Barbenheimer

It seems like an odd category to focus on, but I was ruminating on two performances that have suddenly gained traction in the Oscar race. No, it isn’t common for Best Supporting Actor to be a hot topic this early out, but it is happening now for two reasons. And those two reasons can be summed up in one word: BARBENHEIMER!

Yes, that’s right. Two movies forthcoming competing with each other, to the great delight of the talented artists online, like these:

The purple one is designed by @nunosarnadas on Twitter.

Oh the internet. What treasures.

https://twitter.com/thomashelby_obe/status/1678033950500077568

they become death, destroyers of the world #barbie #Oppenheimer #Barbenheimer pic.twitter.com/f962CueVUy

— rahalarts.eth (@rahalarts) July 14, 2023

Okay, so enough fun. Let’s get down to it.

Ryan Gosling seems to me a strong contender for Best Supporting Actor. The comparison that immediately comes to mind is Kevin Kline, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Otto in A Fish Called Wanda. It is a brilliant performance in a film stuffed full of hilarious performances, from the Monty Python crew (Michael Palin and John Cleese) along with Jamie Lee Curtis. But the scene-stealer was Kevin Kline.

Despite the many roles Kline performed, most notably in Sophie’s Choice, he’s remembered mostly for this great part. But when you look at the other actors in the race that year, it’s not that difficult to see how he won. At the time, there were whispers that he was married to Phoebe Cates, who is the niece of Gil Cates (who produced the Oscar broadcast 14 times between 1990 and 2008), and that made people wonder if Kline deserved to win or if it was about family ties. All of these years later, I think he was more than deserving.

The other nominees in Best Supporting Actor were:

Dean Stockwell, Married to the Mob
River Phoenix, Running on Empty
Alec Guinness, Little Dorrit
Martin Landau, Tucker: The Man and His Dream

Gosling, like Kline, has built up cred as a serious actor for quite some time, although he has thrown in a comedic performance here and there (The Nice Guys). Seeing him let loose as Ken and quite possibly stealing the show does make it more than idle speculation that he could bring in a win for Barbie. Gosling has been nominated twice before for Best Actor for Half Nelson and La La Land.

He really does seem to be the one character who is dominating both the early conversation and the clips released by the studio.

Although it did get a Best Director nomination, A Fish Called Wanda was not a Best Picture contender. But Best Supporting Actor of late has been frequently tied to Best Picture. 2011 was the last time a Best Supporting Actor winner was not in a Best Picture nominee (Christopher Plummer in Beginners) Other fairly recent winners not in Best Picture nominees were Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (posthumously) and George Clooney for Syriana. The question to ask is whether those movies would have been included in the Best Picture category with an expanded ballot.

But what we’ve learned in recent years is that stats don’t matter — at least not until we manage to adjust our formulas to account for new trends and data points. The strength of the Best Picture nominee can sometimes matter. The last two Supporting Actor winners (Ke Huy Quan and Troy Kotsur) were in the Best Picture winners. That might not always matter if the film is beloved enough and/or makes a lot of money.

The other prominent Best Supporting performance that is being talked about is Robert Downey, Jr. in Oppenheimer. I already had him in my predictions based on his character’s significance in the story. Downey has been nominated twice before, once in supporting for Tropic Thunder and once in lead for Chaplin. Downey Jr.’s part in Tropic Thunder was the Ryan Gosling in Barbie kind of role. The movie was never going to get a Best Picture nomination, but his performance was notable because he’d largely done serious roles before and in this case, he was absolutely beyond hilarious.

He plays a white actor trying to play a Black character. It’s so funny and layered… no one has ever topped it. That year, he lost to Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight and it’s hard to argue with that win or that performance.

Trigger warning for more sensitive readers:

In Oppenheimer, Downey portrays Lewis Strauss, who was the government official who really had it in for J. Robert Oppenheimer — a vendetta that lasted for almost a decade. He’s the primary villain of the film, unless you think of our government and military as the much bigger villain for dropping the A-bomb on Japan. Strauss is committed to bringing down Oppenheimer and is relentless in that quest. After reading American Prometheus, I just had a feeling Downey Jr. would slip in to that role expertly. So I’m not surprised that people are talking about his work.

It should be said that Strauss had an important legacy as a Jewish leader in government, and had tried to urge the government to accept more refugees from Germany. But because of his leading role in the government hearings against Oppenheimer, he would ultimately lose his bid to be confirmed as Secretary of Commerce in 1959.

It’s a great part, second only to the Oppenheimer’s, so I imagine Downey Jr. hits it out of the park. I have not yet seen either movie, but will be seeing them in the coming days.

Now, we move on to your regular scheduled programming: where the Best Supporting Actor race was before Barbenheimer. Specifically, we’re looking at the strong supporting players from Killers of the Flower Moon: Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons.  Here is Erik Anderson’s list from June:

1. Robert De Niro – Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures)
2. Colman Domingo – The Color Purple (Warner Bros)
3. Willem Dafoe – Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures)
4. John Magaro – Past Lives (A24)
5. Charles Melton – May December (Netflix)
6. Jesse Plemons – Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures)
7. Ryan Gosling – Barbie (Warner Bros) – lead or supporting?
8. Richard E. Grant – Saltburn (Amazon Studios)
9. Matt Bomer – Maestro (Netflix)
10.  Glenn Howerton – BlackBerry (IFC Films)

Marcus Jones’ analysis over at Indiewire is worth the read, but they don’t predict contenders that they have not yet seen.

Obviously, we can’t know how the Best Supporting Actor race will shake out until we’ve actually seen all of the movies. If the awards voters really love a film like, say … Maestro, then most of the actors will be swept up in that, which could mean Matt Bomer gets a nod.

Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppeneheimer are, I expect, going to be Oscar monsters. That doesn’t mean they’ll be the frontrunners. We know the game well by now. Neither of these sprawling epics is the scrappy underdog that could shock the world, but they will still come into the race with a massive number of nominations across the board, including in the acting categories.

Will we have a perfect storm like we had last year, when voters were over the moon for one movie and it drove them to Baptist revival-level euphoria when it broke records for wins in acting and Best Picture? No movie before Everything Everywhere All at Once had ever won three acting awards, Picture, Director, and Screenplay. So you know it was the exact right movie about the exact right thing at the exact right time within the bubble of the film industry, with one foot in a portion of the movie-going Gen-Z crowd.

Was it a culture quake? No. Did everyone see it? No. Does that matter? No. We’re navigating the waters of NICHE, unless by some miracle a Big Oscar Movie like Oppenheimer can win big. Otherwise the recipe for an Oscar movie is one that is popular with a very specific group of people. That’s not a bad thing. It just is what it is. Even with the social justice theme and intersectional cast of Killers of the Flower Moon, it likely doesn’t head into the realm of euphoria either.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for that scrappy underdog that ignites all the feels. Might that movie be The Color Purple? It has one hell of an Oscar story. If so, Erik’s second choice of Colman Domingo could be a strong contender, and could easily beat Bobby D, who is playing a bad guy like Downey Jr.

In 1985, The Color Purple came in with 10 nominations for Steven Spielberg. It was the last film with a predominantly Black cast in the Oscar race, believe it or not, until 2009 with Precious. That’s because it caused a lot of controversy, from both the Black and gay communities, as well as those in Hollywood who thought Spielberg was trying too hard to win an Oscar. Over time, though, that movie has grown in esteem and has become much more admired.

This new version of it is based on the Broadway musical, as these things go now, but it’s said to be more in line with the Alice Walker novel’s intent — unapologetically gay, in other words. The film version of the musical is full of well-known actors like Louis Gossett Jr. as Old Mister, David Allen Grier as Rev. Avery, and Colman Domingo. Which of those performances will be the strongest, it’s impossible to say, sight unseen.

Erik has listed almost every possible contender under the sun in the alternate sections.

The one actor I think he missed listing is Dominic Sessa from Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. It is essentially, at least according to this script review, a story about Paul Giamatti’s and Sessa’s characters, who are stuck together over Christmas beak.

Given all of this, here are my predictions for this week, not that they matter that much this early. Let’s do a full list for fun, just to see how off it is 8 months from now.

Best Picture
(A note about Best Picture – after last year’s almost complete takeover by original screenplays, we now have a strong lineup of adapted works)

Oppenheimer
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Killer
The Holdovers
Past Lives
Next Goal Wins
The Color Purple
Maestro
Napoleon
Poor Things

Alts:
Dune Part 2
Barbie
Ferrari
Priscilla
Saltburn
Air
The Zone of Interest

Best Director
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
David Fincher, The Killer
Alexander Payne, The Holdovers
Celine Song, Past Lives

Alts:
Denis Villeneuve, Dune Part 2
Greta Gerwig, Barbie
Ridley Scott, Napoleon
Blitz Bazawule, The Color Purple
Michael Mann, Ferrari
Bradley Cooper, Maestro
Sofia Coppola, Priscilla

Best Actor
Bradley Cooper, Maestro
Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon
Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Michael Fassbender, The Killer/Next Goal Wins
Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers

Alts:
Joaquin Phoenix, Napoleon
Colman Domingo, Rustin
Timothée Chalamet, Dune Part 2
Adam Driver, Ferrari
Anthony Hopkins, Freud’s Last Session
Barry Keoghan, Saltburn

Best Actress
(A note on Best Actress: because of the kerfuffle last year with Andrea Riseborough supposesly taking the two slots for two women of color, I expect this category will over-compensate in that regard to make up for last year. I could be wrong, just a hunch)

Fantasia Barrino, The Color Purple
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Greta Lee, Past Lives
Jessica Lange, Long Day’s Journey into Night
Emma Stone, Poor Things

Alts:
Kate Winslet, Lee
Annette Bening, Nyad
Margot Robbie, Barbie
Natalie Portman, May December
Carey Mulligan, Maestro
Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla

Best Supporting Actor
Robert Downey, Jr., Oppenheimer
Ryan Gosling, Barbie
Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon
Dominic Sessa, The Holdovers
Colman Domingo, The Color Purple (or another actor from that movie)

Best Supporting Actress
Kaimana, Next Goal Wins
Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer
Florence Pugh, Oppenheimer
Taraji P. Henson, The Color Purple
Vanessa Kirby, Napoleon

Alts.
Tilda Swinton, The Killer
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Jodie Foster, Nyad
Julianne Moore, May December

Original Screenplay
Past Lives
The Holdovers
Maestro
Saltburn
Napoleon

Alts:
Barbie
Anatomy of a Fall
Asteroid City

Adapted Screenplay
Oppenheimer
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Killer
Poor Things
Next Goal Wins

Alts:
Dune Part 2
The Color Purple
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Priscilla
Ferrari

Editing
The Killer
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer
Napoleon
Next Goal Wins

Cinematography 
Oppenheimer
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Killer
Maestro
Napoleon

I better stop now. There are still too many movies to see. Hope you have a nice weekend.