“Why do you make us watch ALL of these movies? We’re pretty sure the Academy members don’t even do that.”
~AFFotD’s staff
After watching all ten Best Picture nominees for the 2024 Academy Awards and ranking them accordingly, we’ve continued our sicko tradition of watching all the Oscar-nominated films and giving our predictions.
We’ll soon go into all the other categories with a little less “explaining the movie” sections, but for now, having seen all the nominees for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, let’s dive right into our next set of predictions.
Who Should (and Probably Will) Win in the Academy Award Acting Categories
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Annette Bening – Nyad
In her fifth Oscar nominated role (the last two featuring her portraying an LGBTQ+ character), Bening plays the marathon swimmer who (in theory) was the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the assistance of a cage. It took her five tries, one at the age of 28 and four additional attempts in her 60s, but Nyad eventually accomplished her feat (…or that’s what she says).
Bening brings physicality to her role while also highlighting the complicated ego of the real-life subject she portrays. She definitely puts her all in it, and is one of the actresses who seems “due” for an Oscar at this point in her career.
Should She Win?
She gave an Oscar-worthy performance, but this year the odds were stacked against her from the beginning. If you put this performance in a different year, she might have been able to get her career-rewarding win here.
Will She Win?
No. This category is pretty a guarantee for one actress in particular. Oh, speaking of that.
Lily Gladstone – Killers of the Flower Moon
The first Native American actress to win a Golden Globe for Leading Actress, or be nominated for the Academy Award in that same category, Gladstone, who almost quit acting due to a lack of opportunity (and who also was voted as most likely to win an Oscar by her high school yearbook) plays an Osage woman who is tragically trapped in a relationship insidious forces try to strip her of her fortune and health.
Steely calm and yet powerful even as her body deteriorates, Gladstone puts on a master class of restraint that is one of the best performances in recent memories. In doing so, she has essentially swept the award season – she’s won just about every major award and critic’s choice award, and rightfully so.
Should She Win
*points to the previous paragraph*
Will She Win
If she doesn’t win, it’ll be arguably one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history, and also one of the most egregious. But all signs point to Gladstone winning a historic Oscar, and one that she deserves by any metric you can think of.
Sandra Hüller – Anatomy of a Fall
The German actress Hüller also appeared in The Zone of Interest, and between her role there and in Anatomy of a Fall she pulls off world-class acting in three different languages (English, German and French). She plays a writer accused of the murder of her husband and manages to never really let you know if she’s innocent, guilty or somewhere in between. It’s a confident performance across multiple languages and rightfully deserved a nomination.
Should She Win
It’s a fantastic performance, but doesn’t stand out as the best of the year.
Will She Win
Nope. Expect to hear this for the rest of this section, the winner has pretty much already been locked in.
Carey Mulligan – Maestro
In her third Best Actress nomination, Mulligan plays the wife of Leonard Bernstein, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, the *checks notes* *looks at every picture of Carey Mulligan* *checks notes again* Costa Rican actress?
That aside, Mulligan is one of the better American actors out there, and she puts on a soulful emotional performance as the talented and dutiful wife in a, well, complicated marriage who eventually succumbs to cancer. Very Oscar-y shit on display.
Should She Win
This won’t be her last nomination, and we’re about two nominations away from the “well, she’s due” discussion, but again, this year is Gladstone’s year.
Will She Win
Nope.
Emma Stone – Poor Things
Emma Stone plays a re-animated corpse whose unborn child’s brain was implanted in her skull. You see her learn how to talk, walk and eventually take ownership of her life while being topless roughly 30% of the film’s runtime. It’s wild.
To be fair, if you’re going to write a movie that asks, “Let’s examine a baby brain as a prostitute” and end up with 11 Oscar nominations, there are few actresses other than Stone, the apex of ‘a theater kid‘, who can pull it off.
Should She Win
Honestly, almost yes? This is her fourth acting Oscar nomination, and the audacity and lack of inhibition is one of those instances where you’d think, “Finally, it’s her time.”
Except she won already for La La Land and, well, you know where we’re going with the rest of this.
Will She Win
She is probably going to get the second most amount of votes, but no.
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Emily Blunt – Oppenheimer
Between Maestro and Oppenheimer it was a banner year for women who bravely stand by and occasionally confront their brilliant spouses for their infidelity. Blunt plays the wife of the titular Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan isn’t exactly known for writing well-rounded women characters, so it’s a credit to Blunt’s performance that it warranted the nomination this year (surprisingly, the first nomination of her career).
Should She Win
She does everything she can with her role, and was great. But this isn’t her year.
Will She Win
Nope. Like Best Actress, the Best Supporting Actress is almost all but spoken for (in this case for Da’Vine Joy Randolph)
Danielle Brooks – The Color Purple
The musical re-imagining of the Stephen Spielberg film (which was based on the Pulitzer-winning novel) is a fairly intense movie that surprisingly didn’t get more acting nominations, or even any technical award nods.
Danielle Brooks was the only nominee from the film (while she’s best known for her breakout role in Orange Is the New Black, she’s had a pretty good run lately with well-received performances).
Should She Win
It’s a much deserved nomination, but it honestly isn’t the best performance in this category this year.
Will She Win
She’s not really won any of the major awards here. It would be frankly astonishing if she pulled an upset here, but it likely won’t happen as she’s not really in the frontrunner conversation.
America Ferrera – Barbie
After breaking into the entertainment scene with Ugly Betty, America Ferrera is now best known for, well, you know. The Speech.
Her nomination got some backlash, which is dumb (yes, Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie got robbed, but that in no way has anything to do with Ferrera’s performance or nomination). But she did serve as an essential emotional component of the biggest film of the year (with a powerful and confident performance to boot).
Should She Win
Her now-famous speech is award-worthy, and we’d be happy for her if she wins, but we think Randolph deserves it more.
Will She Win
No. This is another locked-in category, and she hasn’t really been winning the awards she’s been nominated for here.
Jodie Foster – Nyad
Foster is a two-time Best Actress winner who was first nominated for Taxi Driver when she was 15 years old. This is her fifth nomination, and first since 1995.
She plays the swimming coach (and former lover) of Annette Bening’s role in Nyad, and puts together a vibrant performance that reminds you the charisma that Foster has that we’ve been missing as she’s only recently started re-focusing on her acting after a shift to directing, and taking a break from showing up in front of the camera for a few years in 2014.
Should She Win
It is one of the better performances of the year, but a win here wouldn’t feel right.
Will She Win
No. Considering that Da’Vine Joy Randolph is the runaway favorite, and with Foster having already won two statues, she’s not going to come away with this.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers
Da’Vine Joy Randolph is a classically trained singer who had a strong 2023. You might know her from her role as Detective Donna Williams in Only Murders in the Building or from her breakout role in My Name is Dolemite. She was also in Rustin, with a strong performance for another Oscar-nominated film.
In The Holdovers she plays the cafeteria manager staying behind at an East Coast prep school suffering through the grief of losing her son in the Vietnam War. She is both larger than life and meant to linger in the background, with some emotional scenes of powerhouse acting sprinkled throughout.
Should She Win
Absolutely. This was the best supporting performance of the year, and acts as one of basically three performances that have to hold up and propel the entire film.
Will She Win
This seems about as easy of a prediction as we’ll see this year. She’s won basically every major category, so we think she can add “Oscar-winner” to her resume next Sunday.
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Bradley Cooper – Maestro
Hey, did you know that Bradley Cooper wants an Oscar? Like, he really-really wants an Oscar. Like he Lionardo-Di-Caprio-in-The-Revenent-but-instead-of-eating-raw-liver-he-spends-six-years-practicing-a-symphony-conduction-scene wants an Oscar.
(He’s not going to win an Oscar.)
This biopic goes through the life of the famed composer and conductor, Leonard Bernstein, filmed in black-and-white as well as in color because like every fucking Oscar-nominated film decided to do that as a “choice” this year.
It follows his life, career and emphasizes his genius as well as his complicated personal life. Bradley Cooper largely embodies the ego and charisma of the man in a technically proficient (and prosthetic).
Should He Win
He is the most “due” of the actors nominated this year (the fact that he has five acting nominations and 12 total -he produces a LOT of movies- is still frankly wild to us. Remember how the first main roles he played were the slightly-nerdy best friend character in Alias the asshole boyfriend in Wedding Crashers?)
But with the exception of Colman Domingo (who we must stress, is a fantastic actor who is coming into his own as a perennial-Oscar-nominee kind of actor), everyone else nominated have been highly-visible, well-regarded Hollywood figures for decades who have been either nominated previously or have had important roles in Oscar-worthy productions. In a weaker year, his extra performance would get him a “well you’re owed this” win, but going against Cillian Murphy and Paul Giamatti, he doesn’t stand a chance.
Will He Win
See above. Not only are Murphy and Giamatti actors who you could argue as being “due” as well, but their performances have been better received and have taken home more hardware. In fact, in the whole awards season Cooper has won two awards for acting- the Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award and the Nevada Film Critics Society.
(Maestro as a whole has won 21 awards out of 179 nominations, including for…*checks notes* *oh dear* the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle Award for “Most Disappointing Film.”)
Colman Domingo – Rustin
Colman Domingo had a wild 2023. Besides receiving his first Academy Award nomination for Rustin (the first Best Actor nominee of Afro-Latino descent, and only the second nomination in the category portraying an openly gay character) he was in five films, including Oscar-nominated The Color Purple and um…Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, while finishing up his 109-episode, 8-year run as Victor Strand in Fear the Walking Dead.
Yes, that’s right, he joins the short list of Walking Dead franchise actors with Oscar nominations. Steven Yuen (Glen Rhee) was nominated for Best Actor in Minari and Samantha Morton (Alpha, a late-season villain) was nominated twice, once for Supporting Actress in Sweet and Lowdown and for Leading Actress in In America are the only others in that club as far as we know.
Anyway, he portrays Bayard Rustin, the gay Civil Rights icon who was largely responsible for the organization of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (which you might know as where the “I Have a Dream” speech took place.
Should He Win
Low-key maybe? His portrayal is bombastic and charismatic and draws all eyes to him at all times. He’s BOLD and a little RECKLESS and if you’ve ever SEEEEEN him in this and in many of his performances…*sharp pause* you can HEAR his voice while reading this.
But it’s not just a show-y performance. He dances between the soft, quiet moments and the loud ones, and adds subtle touches (like a barely-noticeable lisp due to Rustin’s missing teeth as the result from a police beating earlier in his life).
Will He Win
No, as we’ve said, there are only two performances likely to win, and his lack of award season success makes his upset possibility odds slim to none.
Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers
It feels surprising that this is only Giamatti’s second Academy Award nomination. Maybe he’s just been too busy getting his kink on in Billions. Most people who are nerds about movies (like us) might assume that he was nominated for his Merlot-destroying performance in Sideways.
But he actually was nominated for his role as Russel Crowe’s boxing coach in Cinderella Man, which he failed to win, almost 20 years ago.
It seems fitting that his first film with Alexander Payne since their collaboration in Sideways led to a much deserved Oscar nomination (along with a Globe win). He plays a curmudgeonly professor at a prep school essentially forced to look over the students who aren’t able to get back home during the holidays.
He begrudgingly develops an affinity for one of the students (in a fatherly way, get your minds out of the gutter) and you see him slowly but surely shake off his prickly exterior throughout the film. Plus, his eyebrow game is on point.
Should He Win
Yeah. Honestly it’s amazing how many roles he’s had that have deserved Oscars he didn’t even get nominated for. Outside of Sideways (which had two acting nominations, along with Best Picture, Director and Screenplay) which Giamatti was clearly the most essential character, he also broke onto the scene with his incredible, quirky work on the Indie film American Splendor.
His performance in The Holdovers has so much nuance. He’s both an asshole and a softie. An elite intellect without any social intelligence. He is at times hilarious yet sincere. This is an Oscar-worthy performance.
Will He Win
This might be the least confident we feel on any of these categories here. The ultimate winner feels like it’s going to come down to a coin flip. We honestly 55% would prefer him to win, but our entire crush has a crush on the next nominee, who we think will end up coming away with the award. We’ll tell you what role of his made us fanboy/girl on him, and you’ll not get the answer right in 10 guesses. But yeah, we’re hesitantly saying he will not win, though if anyone but the frontrunner does, it’d be Giamatti.
Cillian Murphy – Oppenheimer
Sometimes you become death, destroyer of worlds. Sometimes you cheat on Emily Blunt with Florence Pugh.
Cillian Murphy has had a storied career working with some incredible creatives. He’s the kind of actor that clearly is respected by directors, since he’s worked with many legendary figures multiple times. Before he won his Best Director and Best Picture Oscar, Danny Boyle put him in 28 Days Later and then re-cast him in Sunshine (which is our editor-in-chief’s favorite movie) (it’s a movie about a mission to send a nuclear bomb to restart the sun as it’s burning out. It has Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong and Mark Strong. It made like $10 million. The box office in 2007 was so stupid).
And here, we see his sixth credit on a Christopher Nolan film (apart from the three Batman movies – remember, he was Scarecrow – he was in Inception and Dunkirk, as well as Oppenheimer.)
Of the Nolan films, this was his first as the lead. And he makes the most of it. He projects gaunt intellectual nihilism, mixed with barely conceived anxiety, sprinkled with notes of narcissism. It’s a nuanced portrayal of nuanced historical figure.
Should He Win
As much as Giamatti deserves this award, so does Murphy. He’s an honestly underrated actor who has insane range, but manage to channel the complexity of this complex historical figure better than any actor could in this role.
Will He Win
Hesitantly, yes. For a while, it looked like Giamatti was going to run away, but for the last few months, most of the critics’ awards have been going his way, and he’s likely to be the lead actor of the Best Picture winner. So don’t hold us to this one, but we low-key think he’ll come away with it.
Jeffrey Wright – American Fiction
Jeffrey Wright can be seen everywhere. Westworld. Wes Anderson films. The Hunger Games. Literally two Oscar-nominated films this year.
But this is the first time he’s gotten a nomination, for American Fiction, the satirical dark comedy that casts him as a brilliant author who finds accidental success trying to skewer the industry for the kind of “black” narrative they blindly embrace.
Should He Win
No one in their right mind would be mad if he won – they’d be surprised, sure, but they’d also probably be saying, “YES! Jeffrey Wright is an Oscar Winner! Fuck yes!”
That said his performance was probably the 3rd best of the year.
Will He Win
That would be…surprising. Apart from winning the Film Independent Spirit Award, he’s not won any major award. So this year is probably not his year.
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Sterling K. Brown – American Fiction
Sterling K. Brown is a powerhouse. With nine Emmy nominations and two wins, he has maybe the most insane range of anyone in Hollywood. He makes you cry in This Is Us. He makes you laugh guest-starring in arguably the best episode of Brooklyn 99 ever. He swears his ass off eating hot wings. WHILE RECITING SHAKESPEARE. We do not deserve such a man.
It’s shocking that this is his first Oscar nomination, but it definitely has the hallmark of an Oscar nominated performance. In American Fiction he plays Clifford Ellison, a plastic surgeon going through a divorce who only in his 40s came out as a gay man and is running through his money on party drugs while partaking in a borderline-reckless amount of casual sex. Despite having his own practice, his spending habits stop him from being able to provide for his and his brother’s (Wright’s character, Monk) mother’s elderly care.
He is fire on the screen, which isn’t a surprise, even if the character is written a little on-the-nose and he only has a handful of scenes to do his magic.
Should He Win
He needs to win an Oscar at some point in his career, or we riot, but the role itself is a little too aggressively “GIVE ME A STATUE.” If he won we’d be happy because the acting deserved it, but the actual role and performance probably didn’t.
Will He Win
No. He’s received around 20 nominations for his role, and has only won two (Denver Critics and the African-American Film Critics). He just doesn’t have the momentum.
Robert De Niro – Killers of the Flower Moon
At the age of 80, Robert De Niro is doing some of the best acting of his life. Granted, he’s doing his best work when working with Martin Scorsese, but comparing his performance in The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon is a disservice to the iconic actor with eight Oscar nominations to his name.
De Niro went from 1992 to 2013 without an Oscar nomination, and let’s just say a lot of those years weren’t exactly his best. De Niro is an artist, but also a workhorse, with 129 acting credits to his name. That’s why we saw a twenty year period where he was sort of a caricature of his tough guy persona (the Meet the Parents films were a prime example of that).
Now mind you, ever since he got back on the Oscar stage for his Silver Linings Playbook performance, he’s still had some movies that have been in that “take whatever role” bit, largely indulging in his comedic side (Bad Grandpa, The War with Grandpa, hell you might even think the dude is old.)
In The Irishman he played a conflicted gangster befriending someone he would ultimately betray. In Killers of the Flower Moon, he’s a friend of a community that he tears down with ruthless calculated and clinical strategy. He’s both charming and terrifying. It’s easily his best performance in 30 years.
Should He Win
Maybe? He’s one of three actors who have a legitimate shot, and where it would make total sense for them to win.
Will He Win
Not likely. He’s not really won any awards, and there is a general sense that he already has enough hardware. That said, if he had not won in his career, we could see this going his way.
Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer
Downey Jr. won a Golden Globe for his role as Lewis Strauss, the businessman and politician who is trying to discredit the titular character in Oppenheimer.
This is Iron Man’s third Oscar nomination, and his second portraying a real-life figure (the other was *checks notes* a meta comedy where he played an Australian actor in *checks notes a million times* blackface).
But he does great work here. His character end up as the heel of a movie whose secondary villain is, like, the atomic bomb? And pulls it off.
Should He Win
Yeah. Not only does his career warrant an Oscar, he’s the strongest supporting performance of an absolutely stacked cast of A-listers and award-winners.
Will He Win
Yes. Gosling might pull off the dark horse (we would not be mad about it) but this seems like Downey’s year. He’s won most of the major awards, his performance deserves it, and we love us some Tony Stark.
Ryan Gosling – Barbie
I’m just Ken
Got an Oscar nom again
This would be number three for me – La La Land, Half Nelson, and now Barbie
I’m just Ken
People were quite mad when
Me and America got noms but Margo got robbed and so did Greta
But I’m just Ken
I would like an Oscar win
For my satiric portrayal of toxic masculinity
So I’m just Ken
And I did good
I would like. A statue
But even though it’s not likely
It’s something I could see.
Should He Win
Yeah. An annoying discourse has been around since the Oscar nominations were announced on how Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwin got snubbed, which they did. But America Ferrera was great, and Ryan Gosling stole so many scenes…and both of those worthy actors are in, you know different categories?
Gosling’s Ken is hilarious while hitting every note the script asked of him. He’s a darkhorse here, but if Downey Jr. isn’t going to win, it’ll be him.
Will He Win
Probably not, but he has probably a 35% chance of pulling off the upset here.
Mark Ruffalo – Poor Things
Mark Ruffalo has been nominated four times for an Academy Award, but most of his previous successful roles were…we’ll say more subdue than his gonzo charlatan performance in the gonzo *checks notes* period piece about a baby’s brain being put in Emma Stone’s often-naked body. Yeah checks out.
On one hand, it’s a little jarring to try to see Ruffalo pull off a foppish British accent as the rake and raconteur lawyer who finds himself obsessed with Emma Stone’s ultimate portrayal of the “sexy baby” ideal. That said, he leans into all the grossness of his character and leaves it all on the screen with a peak-Nic-Cage level unhinged (yet somehow controlled) performance. Four stars.
Should He Win
Someday, but not for this. Credit for him going all in, but it’s more ridiculous-to-the-benefit-of-the-film than iconic.
Will He Win
No. He’ll have to try again, maybe with Poor Things 2: More Baby Brains, Somehow More Sex.
So there you have it. Stay tuned for when we give our predictions for all of the other categories, including the ones where we are just blindly throwing at a dart board because we might be Oscar sickos but we’re not watching all the nominees for, like, Best Short Feature. We have families that don’t want to see us, after all.
America Fun Fact of the Day 