96th Oscars Forecast: What this year’s acting winners and nominees have coming that could bring them back next year

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The saying goes something like you’re only as good as your next one and for this last season’s Academy Award winning and nominated actors, we’re taking a look at what they have coming next to follow their wins and noms and if we have afterglows in the mix.

The acting nominees and winners of the 95th Oscars were a unique bunch in that a whopping 16/20 were first-time nominees. Best Actor was all first-timers, something that hadn’t happened in nearly 90 years. For some categories, definitely Best Actor and Supporting Actor, they benefited from several films either not completed in time to make a run last season or being intentionally pulled and set for a debut this year instead. There was just a single previous winner in the mix, Cate Blanchett, who came very close to snagging her third Oscar. But for the four acting winners, those first-time nominations turned into first wins and we can’t wait to see what they do next.

Best Actor

Winner Brendan Fraser (The Whale) was on the career comeback trail all last season, with a narrative that drove passion and compassion for the actor all the way to a win. Next up for Fraser is a chance in Supporting Actor for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon from Apple and Paramount Pictures. One of the films from above that bowed out of 2022 for a 2023 bid, Fraser’s newfound glory could bump up his attention in that film, which also stars Academy Award winner Leonardo DiCaprio and Academy Award nominee Jesse Plemons.

Austin Butler (Elvis) has Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, a 1960s-set story of the rise of a motorcycle gang that also stars Academy Award nominees Tom Hardy and Michael Shannon with Jodie Comer. Butler is presumed to be a co-lead with Hardy here and will also have a supporting role in Dune: Part Two, opposite Academy Award nominee Timothée Chalamet this fall.

Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin) has two TV shows on their way soon (Sugar, whose plot is under wraps, and HBO’s The Penguin, continuing his role from the 2022 film The Batman) and the new film from Todd Solondz (Love Child), about an 11-year-old boy schemes to reshape his mother’s love life, that reunites him with Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz, his co-star in The Lobster. While Solondz has been as far from Oscar bait as a director can be, the directors of the farting corpse-filled movie Swiss Army Man just dominated the Oscars with their follow up, Everything Everywhere All At Once, so I’ll try not to immediately discount that.

Paul Mescal (Aftersun) has turned into the hottest property in Hollywood after his first foray into television (Normal People) earned him an Emmy nomination and a BAFTA win and his first lead role got him an Oscar nomination. The actor just signed on for Ridley Scott’s long-awaited sequel to his Best Picture-winning Gladiator from 2000 but Mescal has a trio of films already in the can and set for release this year: the new musical Carmen from Sony Pictures Classics, Foe from Amazon Studios and co-starring four-time Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan, and Strangers from Searchlight Pictures.

Bill Nighy (Living) found his first nomination at the age of 73 and he has no signs of slowing down as an actor. He has three narrative feature films on the way (plus voice roles in shorts and animated films): The Beautiful Game from Netflix, which follows a soccer team as they travel from London to Rome for the Homeless World Cup, and Role Play, about a young married couple whose past life’s secrets turn their life upside down, as well as The First Omen, no doubt connected to the Omen films of the 1970s and their more recent remakes.

Best Actress

Winner Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All At Once) became the belle of the ball on Oscar night this year, after turning her first career nomination into a win but the veteran actress but there isn’t much on the horizon for her in 2023. She’ll have the TV show American Born Chinese (which reunites her with her EEAAO co-stars Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and James Hong) but for narrative feature films this year, outside of voice work in the new Transformers this summer, she’ll just have the martial arts period piece Da nao donghai. But, 2024 aims to be big for her with the next two Avatar films and the first part of the movie musical version of Wicked, where she’ll play Madame Morrible.

Cate Blanchett (TÁR), the only previous Oscar winner among the lineup of 20 nominees last season, will be back in 2023 with The New Boy, the story of a 9-year-old Aboriginal orphan boy who arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery run by a renegade nun, the video game movie Borderlands (which co-stars Supporting Actress winner Jamie Lee Curtis) and A Manual for Cleaning Women, an adaptation of Lucia Berlin’s short story collection that delves into addictions, addictive relationships and substance abuse. Originally set to be directed by Pedro Almodóvar, the project is in search of a helmer.

Ana de Armas (Blonde) has two features set for 2023, the action comedy Ghosted with Chris Evans set for release on AppleTV+ in April and Ballerina, a thriller about young female assassin seeks revenge against the people who killed her family that co-stars Keanu Reeves, the late Lance Reddick and Academy Award winner Anjelica Huston.

Andrea Riseborough (To Leslie) made the biggest waves in recent Oscar history with her grass-rooted, actor-driven nomination last season and the chameleon-like actress will next be seen in the comedy-drama Funny Birds, alongside Academy Award nominee Catherine Deneuve. But more intriguingly, and certainly more Oscar-y, with Academy Award winner Kate Winslet in Lee, a biopic photographer Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller, a fashion model who became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine during World War II. Riseborough plays Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue at the time and who approved Miller to join Allied forces through Europe to cover the war for the magazine. The film also stars Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard. The film does not yet have U.S. distribution.

Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans) earned her fifth Oscar nomination last season, where she opted for a lead push over supporting for her role of director Steven Spielberg’s mother. Williams has just one film set for 2023, the Kelly Reichardt-directed Showing Up from A24 and set for an early April release. Williams plays a sculptor preparing to open a new show must balance her creative life with the daily dramas of family and friends, and the film co-stars Academy Award nominee from this year, Hong Chau. She also has a Peggy Lee biopic Fever from Todd Haynes in the early stages of development but that won’t see the light of day this year.

Supporting Actor

Winner Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All At Once) had the most heartwarming, and heartbreaking, comeback narrative of the season, returning to feature film acting after decades of rejection and giving up. While the actor has two major television shows on the horizon (American Born Chinese and Loki) and voice work in the upcoming sci-fi film The Electric State with Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, he has no films set for 2023…or in production for the future. In his post-Oscars interview with Variety, Quan worried about what was next for him. “I had a conversation with my agent,” he said. “I’m so worried that this is only a one-time thing.” Let’s hope this changes soon.

Brendan Gleeson (The Banshees of Inisherin) has nothing set for 2023 but is currently working on the Joker sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux with Academy Award winners Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga.

Brian Tyree Henry (Causeway) could return with this year’s Flint Strong, the feature directorial debut from Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison and written by Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins. The story details 17-year old Claressa ‘T-Rex’ Shields, a boxer from Flint, Michigan who trained to become the first woman in her country’s history to win an Olympic gold medal in the sport. It will be released theatrically by MGM.

Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) has a few projects in production right now but the one we’ll all be paying attention to is Saltburn, Academy Award winner Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman from 2020. In the film, where Keoghan will be promoted to a lead campaign. The thriller about obsession set in a world of an English aristocratic family, co-stars Academy Award nominees Carey Mulligan and Rosamund Pike and will be released by Amazon Studios.

Judd Hirsch (The Fabelmans) will next be seen in Showing Up alongside nominees this year, Michelle Williams and Hong Chau, as well as the kids film Rally Caps.

Supporting Actress

Winner Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All At Once) will next be seen in Borderlands (with previous Academy Award winner and nominee last season, Cate Blanchett) as well as Disney’s Haunted Mansion with Academy Award nominees LaKeith Stanfield, Winona Ryder, Danny DeVito, Owen Wilson and Academy Award winner Jared Leto.

Angela Bassett (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) made Oscar history with her nomination from a superhero film, and will be back in the action/adventure fantasy realm with Damsel with Millie Bobby Brown, Nick Robinson, Robin Wright and Academy Award nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo. The Netflix film is set for release in October.

Hong Chau (The Whale) probably has the most excited post-Oscar nomination career in place with upcoming films from Wes Anderson (Asteroid City, with a massive cast of Academy Award winners and nominees) and Yorgos Lanthimos (AND, with Academy Award winner Emma Stone and Academy Award nominees Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons). Asteroid City is set for a June release from Focus Features while AND, from Searchlight Pictures does not have a release date yet. It could move to 2024 and Lanthimos and the studio have his film Poor Things set for this year. But first, Chau will have Showing Up, the A24 film from Kelly Reichardt that finds her with fellow nominees this year, Michelle Williams and Judd Hirsch.

Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin) heads back to Ireland in 2023 with In the Land of Saints and Sinners with Academy Award nominees Liam Neeson and Ciarán Hinds. A thriller set in a remote Irish village, a newly-retired assassin finds himself drawn into a lethal game of cat and mouse with a trio of vengeful terrorists. The film does not yet have distribution.

Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once) has Joy Ride coming up next, playing a supporting role in a Girls Trip meets Joy Luck Club raunchy comedy that just premiered at SXSW. It’s set for a summer release from Lionsgate.

Photo: Michael Yada / ©A.M.P.A.S.