The Oscars should actually award supporting performances

This year, Sinners broke an Academy Awards record by receiving 16 nominations, vaulting over the 14 nominations achieved by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. Looking over those previous recordholders, quirks emerge: La La Land‘s strength in the music categories allowed it to overcome its lack of significant supporting players. Titanic got to 14 without nominations for Leonardo DiCaprio or its screenplay. And All About Eve managed to score a whopping five acting nominations, including the rare feat of putting up two for Best Actress. Eve was the first movie to ever pull this off, and it’s happened about once a decade since—at least until 1991, when both Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) deservedly got in for the movie bearing their name. In the 34 years since, it hasn’t happened again. Over in Best Actor, this was a more frequent occurrence, happening two or three times a decade, until it was curtailed even longer ago, with 1984’s Amadeus still standing as the last time two men from the same movie competed in the leading-actor category. Now, any performer with even the slightest perceived disparity in importance, point of view, or screentime gets shunted over to the supporting category. 

While contenders in the leading categories enjoy certain advantages if they play a real person, utilize a transformed body or makeup routine, or exhibit some manner of suffering, the main supporting-category advantage in recent years has a simpler path to victory: Just play a leading role. For more on this, ask Brad Pitt (Once Upon A Time In Hollywood), Daniel Kaluuya (Judas And The Black Messiah), Mahershala Ali (Green Book), Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl), and Viola Davis (Fences). All play, at worst, the second-most-important character in their respective movies; in some cases, they’re tied for first. This practice is particularly prevalent among men, because movies are still more likely to have multiple male leads. It reached its zenith last year, when both Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain) and Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez) cruised to easy wins based on the unspoken agreement that most movies have just one lead, or maybe two if they’re of opposite genders. 

This year’s supporting categories recede slightly from the lead takeover, which only makes them more lopsided. It’s a stretch to call Stellan Skarsgård’s Gustav a supporting character in Sentimental Value (he gets plenty of scenes from his perspective), and most tellings of Frankenstein do not place The Creature in a genuine supporting role, despite Jacob Elordi’s categorization. The other nominees more or less qualify, which gives Elordi and Skarsgård the now-traditional advantage. (This may also be why Supporting Actress is harder to call this year; no one has shoehorned in a lead as a frontrunner.)

There’s no easy solution to what has sometimes (and perhaps unfairly) been called category fraud. Impact can’t always be measured in screentime, and there are plenty of instances where some technical barrier to entry would simply boot actresses out of the lead category. Besides, it still feels intuitively correct that Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor off of vanishingly little screentime in The Silence Of the Lambs. Plus, it’s natural to want to avoid running multiple performers in a single lead category if you can avoid it. It’s just unfortunate that this pragmatism doesn’t leave much room for genuine supporting parts, especially smaller ones—characters who might have just one or two killer scenes.

What if, however, there was a not-so-secret third thing? This year, the Academy added a category for Best Casting, and next year it will add one for stuntwork, both overdue. While we’re re-evaluating categories, let’s add the first new acting category in decades: Best Performance By An Actor In A Featured Role. This would serve as a parallel to the guest-acting categories in the Emmys, where single-episode turns can still win a full-sized trophy. Without the difference in billing that accompanies a TV guest star versus a series regular or recurring role, a “featured performance” would have no greater formal definition than “leading role” or “supporting role.” Informally and ideally, it would be a role with more depth than a cameo but less screentime than a typical supporting performance—a performance that inarguably improves the film but probably couldn’t wrest much attention from the first, second, and third leads without the power of, say, Dame Judi Dench, whose Oscar-winning shtick in Shakespeare In Love would have made a fine Best Featured Performance winner (or at least nominee). 

This year, Benicio del Toro or Delroy Lindo could qualify for the Best Featured Performance, if strategy so dictated. They’re both certainly strong enough to deserve a Supporting Actor slot, but maybe they’d prefer not to compete with multiple leads sneaking into a different category. Or, for other current examples, here are my personal nominees for 2025, assuming the supporting nominees remain as-is:

Bridget Everett in Wake Up Dead Man