FINAL 2026 Oscar Predictions: SUPPORTING ACTOR

Jacob Elordi’s win for Frankenstein at Critics Choice all but secured him a spot at the Oscar table. In the 32 years of CCA every single winner has been Oscar-nominated and 20 of them have won. Move over to the Golden Globes, where Sentimental Value‘s Stellan Skarsgård won, we only have two example in the last 50 years where the winner fails to translate it to Oscar; Aaron Taylor-Johnson for 2016’s Nocturnal Animals, where his co-star Michael Shannon randomly earned the Academy Award nomination instead and Richard Benjamin in 1975’s The Sunshine Boys, where his co-star George Burns not only got in instead, he won the Oscar.

So where does that leave critics’ leader Benicio Del Toro? Still on the board, obviously, I have him at #2. He has everything he needs but once nominations come out, he’ll need to start winning if he’s going to overtake Skarsgård or Elordi.

Paul Mescal (Hamnet) and Sean Penn (One Battle After Another) have also locked in what they need for a nomination and that would easily round out the final five. But what about Sinners‘ Miles Caton and Delroy Lindo? Neither made much of a dent with precursor nominations until Caton’s surprise SAG nod. Then Lindo showed up on the BAFTA longlist but Caton didn’t (the young actor is a Rising Star nominee, however). Now, anyone that knows me knows I don’t subscribe to vote-splitting; we literally have two actors from One Battle here. But will voters lock into Caton or Lindo? Neither or both? It’s a tough call, I have them both just on the outside but if Sinners manages to overperform, which it definitely can, then Mescal and/or Penn are in trouble.

Here are my final 2026 Oscar nomination predictions in Supporting Actor.

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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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