FINAL 2024 Oscar Predictions: BEST ACTOR

Both of the lead acting races this season have kept us on our toes, with the top two contenders trading critic and industry wins back and forth all season and all in top tier Best Picture nominees.

Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction) picked up the Spirit Award win for lead performance last weekend, the only Oscar nominee in a field of ten there. The pair of Netflix biopic men, Bradley Cooper in Maestro and Colman Domingo in Rustin, managed a spot with all four main precursors and while Domingo’s first nomination was far from guaranteed, Cooper was an early favorite here with the very classic baity combination of playing a real person and doing it under layers of makeup. It’s worked so often we almost default it, and that’s kind of what happened with Cooper, whose first images of his self-directed film came out nearly two years ago – even before last year’s Actor/Makeup winner – and he was anointed the frontrunner on the spot. But time chipped away at Cooper’s chances and although the film was well-received there was, and remains, an inordinate level of negative reaction to Cooper himself – and possibly the overindulgent nature of the film – that he hasn’t been able to escape. It’s a very specific kind of hatred that was wielded against him. People wanting Oscars is a big part of the awards process. A rare few can and have gotten away with not caring. Voters like to see that you want it because they’re giving it to you. Cooper checked all the boxes, including being massively overdue with 12 nominations and no wins. It’s almost like he had too much going for him and while he was able to secure all of the nominations he needed as a performer (he’s also nominated for original screenplay and best picture as a producer for Maestro) at no point once the season really kicked off would he ever find himself above third place at best. He certainly didn’t do himself any favors providing outlets with brutal out of context interview bites about not loving his daughter right away when she was born or having the ghost of Leonard Bernstein inside him. Sometimes too much is too much and for Cooper it was.

But even without Cooper’s own self-placed obstacles in his way were two men that dominated critics prizes and never let up.

Paul Giamatti has been a respected veteran for more than two decades and if you were around in 2004 when his Best Actor snub for Alexander Payne’s Sideways happened (something I wildly predicted that year) you know there’s been this underlying factor to reward him. The Oscars and SAG did an about face the very next year, when he earned an Academy Award nomination in supporting actor for Cinderella Man and won the SAG for it. But that was 20 years ago and while he had success with the Emmys and SAG for his television work, he’s never really been in contention again for the Oscars until now, Barney’s Version Golden Globe win aside (sorry Big Fat Liar fans). So in a sense Giamatti has felt under-rewarded and ‘due’ more than truth actually tells. For The Holdovers, also from Payne, he made a Best Actor comeback after his two-decades-old snub and has gobbled up over a dozen critics wins – including Critics Choice – and another Golden Globe. But is that enough to push him over the BAFTA and SAG winner? In short, no.

Not only is Cillian Murphy the titular role in Oppenheimer (insert Beanie Feldstein gif) he’s in nearly every frame of the film. He is the film. He ran side by side with Giamatti with critics wins then overtook him in January as the televised awards shows got underway. Shy and not very gregarious about awards season, Murphy has been essentially the anti-Bradley Cooper in that sense; subtle both in performance and personality and having both shine through for voters in the end. He triumphed at BAFTA, becoming the first Irish actor to win Best Actor there in the group’s 77 years (!!!) and then completed a seemingly even bigger hurdle, leaping over Giamatti at SAG.

Since the first year of the Screen Actors Guild awards (1994), 16 actors have won the Golden Globe, SAG and BAFTA and of those 16, 15 of them won the Oscar. The outlier, of course, is Russell Crowe in the Best Picture winner A Beautiful Mind (2001), who had just won the year before for Gladiator. But between his phone-throwing antics at BAFTA and the groundswell support for Denzel Washington to win his first lead Oscar and to have it coupled with Halle Berry becoming the first Black Best Actress winner, the cards were dealt.

There’s a sort of Mandela effect, I think, with Best Actor and Best Picture. While the two were very closely connected for nearly 80 years of Oscar, since the Best Picture expansion in 2009 it’s only happened twice – Colin Firth in 2010’s The King’s Speech and the very next year with Jean Dujardin in 2011’s The Artist. In this new age, the stars need to align in a very particular way and this year, they most likely have.

Is there a possibility that Murphy could lose? Yes, of course. But chances are near zero.

Here are my ranked final 2024 Oscar predictions for Best Actor.