What Does "Supporting" Mean?
This may only matter to me. And I'm sorry for that.
At the 2025 Oscars, earlier this year, even though it feels like decades ago, four lead actors swept the acting categories. They were Adrien Brody for The Brutalist, Mikey Madison for Anora, Kieran Culkin for A Real Pain and Zoe Saldaña for Emilia Pérez1.
Sure, Culkin and Saldaña technically won for Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress, respectively, but they’re easily lead performances that were category frauded into Academy Awards.
It’s a tough balance between screentime and a movie’s motivation, and the way that I generally decide if something is lead or supporting depends on the main thrust of the movie and if it runs through the character or not. Culkin and Saldaña are both leads, as their movies use their characters as conduits for the stories and (in sports terms) run the majority of the plays through them. Sometimes you can have two leads, as A Real Pain and Emilia Pérez do, and then things get really tricky.
This is far from new. The Ringer even ranked “The 25 Most Egregious Cases of Category Fraud in Oscar History," and yet this feels like the time to look at where this Oscar season is going and make some definitive statements. Nothing’s more fun than a definitive statement.
This is where things currently stand heading into mid-December, and I’m actually relatively okay with all of these as supporting performances. Penn, Stellan Skarsgård, Mescal and Grande are all on the line for me; however, there’s at least a pretty reasonable argument that each is playing a backup role in someone else’s main narrative.
I think the fear with this (at least for me) is that the best one-scene or smaller roles get eaten up by these hefty parts that garner accolades and pundits’ attention. Anyway, here are a handful of supporting roles that I think are being passed on for bigger performances. I don’t expect these four to be winning awards, but they’ve won my heart. And isn’t that all that really matters?
John Carroll Lynch in Sorry, Baby
I was reading the Sorry, Baby script recently and found another Pete scene, which I wasn’t expecting and was eventually cut from the film. And even though it was sweet and well-written, I thought this was for the best. In the final product, John Carroll Lynch shows up for one scene as a curmudgeonly sandwich-shop owner and has a pretty beautiful back-and-forth with Eva Victor’s Agnes. He pops in for a few minutes with a tremendous accent and stops the movie in its tracks.
Marisa Abela in Black Bag
I think one of the reasons that Black Bag, a tremendous spy thriller that my dad stayed awake for, has been thrown to the wayside in this year’s awards race is that no one remembers that it was actually this year. The 94-minute thriller dropped in March, and one trillion things have happened since then. Anyway, Abela’s the best part of a Steven Soderbergh movie starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a signals intelligence and satellite imagery specialist having the time of her life caught in the middle of chaos. She’s wonderful and almost makes me want to watch Industry.
Tramell Tillman in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Okay, so I don’t watch Severance, but I’ve heard how great Tramell Tillman is in the Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller. And then he walks into the final Mission: Impossible movie and immediately knows what type of role he’s playing and how much fun he’s supposed to have. Although fun, this movie is a mess trying to tie up every loose end and being WAY too serious, when it should’ve been the shlocky, chaotic action movie that Tillman’s character (along with the submarine subplot) is up to.
Olivia Colman in Paddington in Peru
It’s not like Olivia Colman needs more awards. She’s already won an Oscar and seems to be doing just fine. And still, sometimes we all need a reminder that she’s just one of the best we have. Paddington in Peru may not reach the heights of the first two Paddingtons, and that’s just fine. It’s still a well-made movie about the best bear out there, with a handful of stars having the time of their lives. Colman chews up the scenery in this third installment and is a perfect successor to Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.
Remember Emilia Pérez?