2022 Oscar Predictions: SUPPORTING ACTOR (May)

Erik Anderson May 10, 2021

As I mentioned in my Best Actor predictions, the coronavirus bumping tons of 2020 releases to 2021 has presented itself with an overabundance for a few actors that will have two or more supporting roles competing against each other for votes come awards time.

Several actors, from Jon Bernthal, Adam Driver, Richard Jenkins, Corey Hawkins, Rob Morgan to Willem Dafoe, all have more than one high profile film and will need one performance to stand out and get noticed above the rest. Sometimes, a performer can have two, three, even four roles in a single year but very quickly voting bodies coalesce around one, often the one in the bigger film, to push. Jessica Chastain in 2011, for example, has Coriolanus, The Debt, The Help, Take Shelter and The Tree of Life. Although her work in Take Shelter and The Tree of Life were more lauded, awards bodies zeroed in on the blockbuster hit The Help and that earned the actress her first Oscar nomination.

This year, we have well-established Oscar winners and nominees going up against those aiming for their first nominations. Not unusual, but with so many films this year with very large and very starry ensembles (Don’t Look Up, The French Dispatch, the Untitled David O. Russell aka Canterbury Glass) voters may have a hard time making up their minds and gravitate towards films and performances with larger supporting roles that border on co-leads. Hey, they literally just did that this year by nominated both Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield from Judas and the Black Messiah in this category, where Kaluuya won. So at this point, category placement of several contenders here could be up in the air.

In my Best Picture piece I discussed how we have more high-profile musicals than we’ve seen in decades this year, both adapted and original. Jon Chu’s In the Heights comes out this summer (and may be more of a supporting actress play) but Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story comes with enormous pressure of the pedigree behind it. One of the Oscars won by the first film adaptation in 1961 was George Chakiris in this very category. In the new version, David Alvarez takes the reigns of Bernardo, but can he match Chakiris here?

Here is my first take on Supporting Actor contenders for the 2022 Oscars, with an alphabetized list of likely contenders then a ranked list.

Christopher Abbott – The Forgiven (Searchlight Pictures)
Ben Affleck – The Last Duel (20th Century Studios)
Adam Beach – Swan Song (Apple)
Jon Bernthal – King Richard (Warner Bros)
Jon Bernthal – Unforgiven (Netflix)
Reed Birney – Mass (Bleecker Street)
Adrien Brody – Blonde (Netflix)
Bobby Cannavale – Blonde (Netflix)
Timothée Chalamet – Don’t Look Up (Netflix)
Timothée Chalamet – The French Dispatch (Searchlight Pictures)
Willem Dafoe – The Card Counter (Focus Features)
Willem Dafoe – The Northman (Focus)
Robert De Niro – Untitled David O. Russell aka Canterbury Glass (20th Century Studios)
Eugenio Derbez – CODA (Apple)
Joel Edgerton – The Green Knight (A24)
Idris Elba – The Harder They Fall (Netflix)
Colin Firth – Mothering Sunday (Sony Pictures Classics)
Andrew Garfield – The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Searchlight Pictures)
Daniel Gimenez Cacho – Memoria (Neon)
Sean Harris – Spencer (Neon)
Kelvin Harrison Jr. – Cyrano (MGM)
Ethan Hawke – The Northman (A24)
Corey Hawkins – In the Heights (Warner Bros)
Corey Hawkins – The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24)
Simon Helberg – Annette (Amazon Studios)
Brian Tyree Henry – Red White and Water (A24)
Jonah Hill – Don’t Look Up (Netflix)
André Holland – Passing (Netflix)
Jeremy Irons – House of Gucci (MGM/UA)
Oscar Isaac – Dune (Warner Bros)
Richard Jenkins – The Humans (A24)
Troy Kotsur – CODA (Apple+)
Jared Leto – House of Gucci (MGM/UA)
Tony Leung Chiu-wai – Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Disney/Marvel)
Matthew Macfadyen – Operation Mincemeat (Netflix)
John Magaro – The Many Saints of Newark (Warner Bros/HBO Max)
Rami Malek – Untitled David O. Russell aka Canterbury Glass (20th Century Studios)
Oscar Martinez – Official Competition (Sony Pictures Classics)
Ben Mendelsohn – Cyrano (MGM)
Rob Morgan – Don’t Look Up (Netflix)
Rob Morgan – Unforgiven (Netflix)
Josh O’Connor – Mothering Sunday (Sony Pictures Classics)
Chris O’Dowd – The Starling (Netflix)
David Oyelowo – Untitled Murder Mystery (Searchlight Pictures)
Chris Pine – Don’t Worry Darling (Warner Bros)
Benny Safdie – Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson aka Soggy Bottom (MGM)
Matthias Schoenaerts – Untitled David O. Russell aka Canterbury Glass (20th Century Studios)
Toni Servillo – The Hand of God (Netflix)
Tye Sheridan – The Card Counter (Focus Features)
J. K. Simmons – Being the Ricardos (Amazon Studios)
Matt Smith – Last Night in Soho (Focus Features)
Jimmy Smits – In the Heights (Warner Bros/HBO Max)
Timothy Spall – Spencer (Neon)
LaKeith Stanfield – The Harder They Fall (Netflix)
Corey Stoll – The Many Saints of Newark (Warner Bros/HBO Max)
Saïd Taghmaoui – The Forgiven (Searchlight Pictures)
Benjamin Voisin – The Mad Woman’s Ball (Amazon Studios)
Forest Whitaker – Respect (MGM/UA)
Bradley Whitford – tick, tick… Boom (Netflix)
Finn Wittrock – Deep Water (20th Century Studios)
Nikita Yefremov – Tetris (Apple)
Mourab Zaoui – The Forgiven (Searchlight Pictures)

Here are my ranked Supporting Actor Oscar predictions for May 2021.

1. Richard Jenkins – Nightmare Alley (Searchlight Pictures)
2. Adam Driver – The Last Duel (20th Century Studios)
3. Bradley Cooper – Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson aka Soggy Bottom (MGM/UA)
4. John David Washington – Untitled David O. Russell aka Canterbury Glass (20th Century Studios)
5. Jesse Plemons – The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
6. Benicio Del Toro – The French Dispatch (Searchlight Pictures)
7. David Alvarez – West Side Story (20th Century Studios)
8. Ciarán Hinds – Belfast (Focus Features)
9. Al Pacino – House of Gucci (MGM/UA)
10. Kaimana – Next Goal Wins (Searchlight Pictures) – category placement TBD

Other contenders: Claes Bang – The Northman (Focus Features), Willem Dafoe – Nightmare Alley (Searchlight Pictures), Brendan Gleeson – The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24), Kelvin Harrison Jr. – Cyrano (MGM), Delroy Lindo – The Harder They Fall (Netflix), Alessandro Nivola – The Many Saints of Newark (Warner Bros/HBO Max), David Strathairn – Nightmare Alley (Searchlight Pictures), Steven Yeun – The Humans (A24)

Films currently without distribution or possibly unfinished in time

Idris Elba – Three Thousand Years of Longing (MGM)
Grégory Gadebois – Presidents (TBD)
Woody Harrelson – Triangle of Sadness (TBD)
Oliver Jackson-Cohen – The Lost Daughter (TBD)
John Leguizamo – Harry Haft (TBD)
Ben Mendelsohn – Mysanthrope (TBD)
Paul Mescal – The Lost Daughter (TBD)
Peter Sarsgaard – Harry Haft (TBD)
Peter Sarsgaard – The Lost Daughter (TBD)
Jean Dujardin – Presidents (TBD)
Harry Styles – Don’t Worry Darling (Warner Bros)
Lambert Wilson – Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (TBD)

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.