Oscar 2023 Winner Predictions: Supporting Actress

It was 15 (!) years ago when we surveyed what appeared to be a very competitive best supporting actress race and asked, a cartoon light bulb turning on over our heads, “Does [Tilda] Swinton have this one almost by default?” As Ed suggested earlier this week while surveying the similarly competitive best actor race, we’re having a lot of déjà vu this year as the acting races, almost to a one, get less settled in the home stretch, not more.

Both Ed and I have felt for weeks like we’re in the stupidest, hot dog-fingeriest multiverse as we’ve tried to wrap our heads around an industry that’s simultaneously nutso for Daniels’s Everything Everywhere All at Once and, at the same time, seems to be bending over backward to give this award to anyone but Stephanie Hsu, the film’s stealth MVP.

We grant that the demographic that vociferously doesn’t “get” Everything Everywhere All at Once and, in fact, is making a great show of the fact that they turned it off in the first 30 minutes probably aren’t going to get to Hsu’s most wrenching work. Hell, they’ll likely have checked out before even her earlier, fiercest moments. But with each passing guild triumph, we’re left drawing the conclusion that the anti-Everything Everywhere All at Once brigade are nothing more than a noisy minority. And even though we’ll still have to reckon with their likely last-place placements when it comes to best picture’s preferential ballot, in all other races we’re increasingly comfortable saying that the acolytes are enough to carry the film through.

Except maybe here. SAG notably opted for Hsu’s veteran co-nominee, Jamie Lee “Nepo Baby” Curtis, and if Angela Bassett’s “she’s overdue” narrative is vaporizing into the Oscar blogger-fueled fantasy it always was, no one’s in a better position to occupy the vacuum. Or would be, were Curtis’s part not so incidental to the film’s core family dynamic, and, truth be told, no less broadly comic book-oriented than whatever Bassett accomplishes over in the (still Oscar-underperforming) MCU. Which is why, again, we’re going out on a limb and giving Hsu the edge over her co-star, even though she has yet to actually win a single industry citation.

But, to circle back to our acting race flashback du jour, does Kerry Condon have this one almost by default? Her win over Bassett—who, everyone had just been reminded, “did the thing”—at the BAFTAs was the first major blow to the latter’s chances among the televised awards. But it also cleared the decks for a race that, at least six weeks ago, felt like it was Condon’s to lose.

She may not represent the most-liked film in the category, as Swinton did, but she’s the only nominee who has an award from a major critics’ group under her belt (from the National Society of Film Critics). And, just as Swinton’s plight as a careerist woman struggling to break through the glass ceiling in 2007 resonated with more than a few female voters in the old-school AMPAS, Condon’s assertion that men are, by and large, “so feckkin’ stupid”—and her subsequent flight to somewhere, anywhere other than here—feels like the Academy, circa 2023.

Will Win: Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin

Could Win: Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Should Win: Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once