Oscar predictions 2025: Who will win and should win Best Supporting Actor?
After winning numerous prizes for Succession, Kieran Culkin looks set to continue his film awards season streak for A Real Pain.
Unlike some of this year’s major Academy Award categories, the hot favourite for the best supporting actor Oscar has been the frontrunner since December last year, when Kieran Culkin's puckish performance in buddy road movie A Real Pain garnered prize-winning attention from the critics' circles.
As the mercurial slacker to Jesse Eisenberg’s more down-to-earth cousin, Culkin has a ball with his co-star’s sardonic yet sobering Oscar-nominated script that takes the chalk-and-cheese duo on an illuminating trip to Poland, the birthplace of their recently passed Jewish grandmother.
Winner of a Golden Globe and a BAFTA, the coronation of the first-time nominee looks assured. But what of the competition?
The likes of Jonathan Bailey (Wicked), Clarence Maclin (Sing Sing) and two-time winner Denzel Washington (Gladiator II) did show up in other lists, but not when it came to the Oscar nominations, leaving a quartet of three other first-time nominees and a relative veteran in Edward Norton earning his fourth.
Norton was previously nominated as best supporting actor for Primal Fear (1997) and Birdman (2015), and best actor for American History X (1999).
This year, the 55-year-old actor has been shortlisted for playing Pete Seeger in the music biopic A Complete Unknown, in which the folk pioneer witnesses Timothée Chalamet’s young Bob Dylan embarking on a journey from folk-music sensation in 1961 to almost pariah status for going electric in 1965. Norton is possibly second favourite.
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Guy Pearce’s first nomination is for The Brutalist and his pivotal role as Harrison Lee Van Buren, the enigmatic and monied industrialist whose offer of the American Dream to Adrien Brody’s Hungarian Holocaust survivor and visionary architect masks a darker reality. It is probably the Aussie star’s best work since Memento in 2000.
A first-timer, too, is Kieran Culkin’s Succession co-star Jeremy Strong, going deep in The Apprentice to play fearsome lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, whose mentoring of a young real-estate tycoon called Donald Trump in the 1970s and '80s arguably made him the man he is today.
And then, finally, Yura Borisov receives a nominee nod for offbeat Cinderella tale Anora, in which the Russian actor plays the henchman/minder to the son of a Russian oligarch who falls for and then marries Mikey Madison’s Brooklyn stripper.
Much of the controversy surrounding the Oscars this year involves Emilia Pérez, but if there is any related to Culkin’s inexorable march to victory, it is over so-called "category fraud" – when what is arguably a leading role is mooted "For Your Consideration" by the studio in the supporting category, therefore giving it a better chance of copping an Oscar.
You can understand why, with Culkin on screen as much as co-star Eisenberg. A similar criticism has also been made about Zoe Saldaña (another odds-on favourite to win) in Emilia Pérez and Ariana Grande for Wicked.
Nevertheless, that is not likely to prevent the first member of the Culkin family from striking Oscar gold on 2nd March.
The Academy Awards will take place on Sunday 2nd March.
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