Best Supporting Actress has a frontrunner in Regina King, but there's a good chance she is upset by Rachel Weisz or even Marina de Tavira.
Best Supporting Actress is possibly the trickiest category to predict at the Oscars this year.
Here are my current rankings:
- Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk) — Golden Globe, Critics Choice
- Amy Adams (Vice)
- Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)
- Marina de Tavira (Roma)
- Emma Stone (The Favourite)
Check out all our 2019 Oscar Predictions: Best Picture | Best Actor | Best Actress | Best Supporting Actor | Best Supporting Actress
Despite winning nearly every critics' group prize — including the OFCS, the group I'm a part of — Regina King isn't the surefire frontrunner she should be for her warm and emotional performance in If Beale Street Could Talk.
That's because she missed a nomination at the BAFTAs and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. For context, that last winner of Best Supporting Actress that didn't at least get a nomination at the SAG Awards was 2000 when Marcia Gay Harden won the Oscar for Pollack.
You have to go back to 2007 for the last time the winner of this category didn't also win the Oscar — that year, Ruby Dee won the SAG for American Gangster and Tilda Swinton won the Oscar for Michael Clayton.
King has to worry about that first statistic more than the second since this year's winner of the SAG Award was Emily Blunt for A Quiet Place, who wasn't even nominated at the Oscars.
The fact that one of her fellow Oscar nominees didn't win will help her. Especially, Amy Adams for her performance as Lynne Cheney in Vice and Rachel Weiss for her performance in The Favourite — both of whom are her biggest competition.
Adams, with her six nominations, could become the living actor with the most Oscar nominations without a win if Glenn Close finally wins on her seventh nomination in Best Actress, as expected. Her overdue narrative can push her to a win. The problem, though, is that her performance isn't nearly as well received as her other nominations and ultimately takes a backseat to Christian Bale's transformative performance as Dick Cheney.
Who might really be the favorite is Rachel Weisz. This year has eerily followed the 2015 Best Supporting Actor race where Sylvester Stallone was the frontrunner — winning the Golden Globe and being snubbed by SAG (which is won by non-Oscar nominee Idris Elba) and BAFTA just like King — to lose the Oscar to the BAFTA winner, Mark Rylance.
Whoever wins the BAFTA could be the actual frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress. However,
Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.