FINAL 2023 Oscar Predictions: SUPPORTING ACTOR

In a year of a tremendous amount of narratives for actors and their complicated paths to comebacks, none stands taller than that of Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Even before the film began its guild sweeps it was Quan, who left acting 30 years ago after the phone stopped ringing, dominated critics’ wins more than any single performance of 2022.

“I was very lost. I was very dispirited for a long time,” Quan said in Kevin L. Lee’s in-depth profile of the actor for AW. “And it’s horrible when you are young, when you’re 18, and you just graduated from high school and you’re thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I have this long road ahead of me. I’m just starting.’ For a lot of people, the road is long and wide and far into the distance. For me, it was a dead end.”

Quan triumphantly won the Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice and the Screen Actors Guild award but did surprisingly lose BAFTA to Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin); the last five years in a row has seen sweeps in this category. That sent me on a chart building mission to look at how SAG and BAFTA specifically matched up with Oscar, when and why. Using 2000 as the kicking off point (the first year BAFTA moved before the Oscars) we can see that those first few years were some growing pains, and even differing SAG category placements gave us scattered wins over sweeps. Overall, SAG has proven to be the better precursor for Supporting Actor, especially when you attach Best Picture to it. Four of the five SAG-only winners that won the Oscar did so in the eventual Best Picture winner. With EEAAO the clear frontrunner, there isn’t much opportunity for Keoghan to pull an Alan Arkin or Mark Rylance or Christophe Waltz here. The Oscar is Quan’s to lose and has been for a minute.

Here are my final 2023 Oscar winner predictions for Supporting Actor.