2025 Oscars: Best Supporting Actor Predictions
- Nominations voting for the 97th Oscars will take place from January 8-12, 2025, with the official nominations announced on January 17, 2025.
Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7:00 p.m. ET/ 4:00 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions .
The State of the Race
As Oscar voting begins to wrap, the person most pegged to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor is the person it has always been since the beginning of last year. “A Real Pain” star Kieran Culkin has won the Golden Globe, the Critics Choice Award, the BAFTA, and likely the SAG Award, in addition to all the critics prizes the Emmy winner has collected for his first big role since the end of “Succession.”
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The BAFTAs are what especially tip things over, since “A Real Pain” also won Best Original Screenplay there, an award it is not the current frontrunner for at the Oscars. The Sundance premiere’s main competition in that category is “Anora,” the film currently pegged to win Best Picture. With that kind of momentum, one could argue that Culkin’s biggest competition would be Yura Borisov, one of the breakout stars of the Palme d’Or-winning Neon release.
But the other name that keeps coming up as a possibility, especially since he was able to scoot right into the category late in the game, for a film that has outperformed expectations as far Oscar nominations go, is “A Complete Unknown” star Edward Norton. This marks the actor’s fourth Oscar nod, yet there weirdly has not been as much conversation around him being overdue as one would think.
It is almost as if his recognition has had diminishing returns, with his first nomination being for “Primal Fear,” an extremely memorable debut, then “American History X,” a performance that’s a favorite among actors, then “Birdman,” which was at least a Best Picture winner, and now “A Complete Unknown,” which, so far, just has not been able to translate all the attention it got from securing major nominations from all the significant awards bodies into winning some actual trophies.
Arguably, the “he’s due” narrative has been applied more toward “The Brutalist” star Guy Pearce, who has been in plenty of Oscar nominated movies, but only just received his first nomination for his performance in the Brady Corbet epic. However, he and “The Apprentice” star Jeremy Strong have not been as consistently recognized by awards precursors as their fellow Best Supporting Actor nominees.
Nominees are listed in order of likelihood to win.
Kieran Culkin (“A Real Pain”)
Yura Borisov (“Anora”)
Edward Norton (“A Complete Unknown”)
Guy Pearce (“The Brutalist”)
Jeremy Strong (“The Apprentice”)
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