FINAL 2025 Oscar Predictions: SUPPORTING ACTOR and SUPPORTING ACTRESS

With all precursors in hand – BAFTA, Critics Choice, Golden Globe and SAG – Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain) and Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez) are your supporting acting Oscar winners this year. Anyone else would be an upset of seismic proportions and even in a season as wild and unhinged as this one’s been, these are the least likely categories to find themselves going any other way.

But let’s talk about ‘supporting’ for a minute. Category fraud is a favorite phrase among awards pundits, professionals and hobbyists alike. It’s certainly not a new phenomenon; Tatum O’Neal (1972’s Paper Moon) and Patti Duke (1962’s The Miracle Worker) are #1 and #2 for the most percentage of screen time of all supporting actress winners with 65.49% and 61.67%, respectively. That works out to 1:06:58 and 1:05:43, making it pretty impossible to call these roles supporting other than the fact that they were teens and pre-teens at the time. More recently, winners like Mahershala Ali in Green Book (1:06:38) showed that strategy has been paramount to screen time and Alicia Vikander in The Danish Girl (59:37) showed that even when there’s no internal competition, category pushes with great visibility are key. We used to live in an Oscar era where two lead actors or lead actresses from the same film were nominated side by side but then it simply stopped happening; 1992 for Best Actress and 1984 for Best Actor. Studios and strategists started to see too many clients missing out on a nomination when they were running two leads at the same time, giving us supporting nominations for Ethan Hawke in Training Day (with more screen time than lead nominee and winner Denzel Washington) and Rooney Mara in Carol (who won Best Actress at Cannes), with a huge 59.67% of screen time alongside lead nominee Cate Blanchett.

This year both Culkin and Saldaña are undeniable leads, or co-leads, of their respective films with Culkin set to obliterate the record of screen time percentage when he wins with 64.88% (58:06). Saldaña has more screen time than her Best Actress-nominated co-star (57:50 / 43.69% vs 52:21 / 39.54%) and the film, like with Culkin’s, begins and ends with her. If Ariana Grande (Wicked) was the frontrunner the numbers are even wilder (1:11:25 / 44.59%).

So what does all of this griping mean? Should the Academy enforce a rule about where you can be nominated based on your screen time? Would that mean a performance like Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs would be forced into supporting, negating impact of a role being an overriding factor? I know that a lot of folks would actually like to see some type of standard set about screen time but when you consider that, unlike the Golden Globes or Screen Actors Guild, you don’t ‘submit’ into a specific acting category, it seems like wishful thinking that it would ever happen. The Academy will do what it wants, when it wants it, and we’ve actually seen examples on the wildly swinging spectrum to that effect; the two most notable being the supporting push for Kate Winslet in 2008’s The Reader (to avoid conflict with her other film, Revolutionary Road) where she was submitted, nominated and won at both the Golden Globes and SAG then nominated in Best Actress at the Oscars and won there too, and LaKeith Stanfield, pushed as lead for 2021’s Judas and the Black Messiah but was then nominated for supporting actor alongside his co-star Daniel Kaluuya, the Oscar winner that year.

This season, Sony Pictures Classics bravely chose to push both Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as leads for The Room Next Door, with Swinton earning a Globe nomination for her performance, despite having less screen time than her co-star. But, as a non-starter anywhere else this season, it’s not much of an example. So, until the Academy is willing to nominate two leads in the same category again, we’re not likely going to see a major campaign run with co-leads any time soon.

Here are my final 2025 Oscar winner predictions in Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress for the 97th Academy Awards.

SUPPORTING ACTOR

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

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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), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) 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.

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