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.
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)
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