Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
• Raw
• Get Out
• Lady Bird
• The Shape of Water
• The Florida Project
Hope Dickson Leach’s brilliant The Levelling (which was ludicrously overlooked in the Bafta nominations) isn’t one of the 341 films eligible for this year’s Oscars. Neither are Maysaloun Hamoud’s In Between and Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch in the running, although both were among my highlights of the year. However, my favourite film of 2017 is a nominal contender, although it has zero chance of earning any nominations: Julia Ducournau’s ravenous French-Belgian masterpiece Raw, which marked the arrival of a major new film-making talent.
Will win: Lady Bird
Best director
• Julia Ducournau – Raw
• Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
• Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
• Jordan Peele – Get Out
• Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Depressingly, both the Baftas and Golden Globes had male-only best director shortlists – a miserable result in a year that boasted such diverse offerings as Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Dee Rees’s Mudbound, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, and Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman. I suspect that on Oscar night Christopher Nolan will triumph for Dunkirk, although I’d be happy to see the award go to Gerwig, or Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water.
Will win: Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Best actor
• Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
• Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
• Harris Dickinson – Beach Rats
• David Oyelowo – A United Kingdom
• Andy Serkis – War for the Planet of the Apes
Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom featured in my best of 2016 Observer roundup, but didn’t open in the US until 2017, so it’s only now that I can nominate David Oyelowo for his brilliant performance as Seretse Khama. Andy Serkis is long overdue recognition for his motion-capture work, particularly in the rebooted Apes series, but the Academy isn’t yet ready to make that technological leap. Harris Dickinson is a star of tomorrow, but my vote goes to British actor Daniel Kaluuya for his utterly engaging central performance in Get Out.
Will win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Best actress
• Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
• Ahn Seo Hyun – Okja
• Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water
• Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Margot Robbie – I, Tonya
An extraordinary central performance by Florence Pugh provided the beating heart of William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth – bold, fearless and commanding. Sally Hawkins is sublime in Guillermo del Toro’s magical fantasy The Shape of Water, while young Ahn Seo Hyun works wonders in Bong Joon Ho’s creature feature Okja. But Frances McDormand will be the one to beat on Oscar night, with Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri providing her best role since Fargo.
Will win: Frances McDormand –
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actor
• Wes Studi – Hostiles
• John Boyega – Detroit
• Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
• Barry Keoghan – The Killing of a Sacred Deer
• Will Poulter – Detroit
There has been little awards support for Kathryn Bigelow’s increasingly horrifying “anatomy of an uprising” Detroit, but among the accomplished ensemble cast I found both John Boyega and Will Poulter to be utterly engrossing. Barry Keoghan is convincingly creepy in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Willem Dafoe is on course for Oscar victory in The Florida Project. But it’s Wes Studi’s Chief Yellow Hawk in Hostiles that proved most arresting for me.
Will win: Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Best supporting actress
• Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
• Carmen Ejogo – It Comes at Night
• Allison Janney – I, Tonya
• Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water
• Taliah Lennice Webster – Good Time
Newcomer Taliah Lennice Webster was extraordinary in her debut role in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time, holding her own against seasoned performer Robert Pattinson. Octavia Spencer won a supporting actress Oscar for The Help and was nominated again for Hidden Figures - her winning role in The Shape of Water confirms her versatility. But my vote goes to Lesley Manville, who provides the perfect foil for a prickly Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.
Will win: Laurie Metcalf –
Lady Bird
Other categories: best score
• Hans Zimmer – Dunkirk
• Jonny Greenwood – Phantom Thread
• Oneohtrix Point Never (AKA Daniel Lopatin) – Good Time
• Tamar-Kali – Mudbound
• Alexandre Desplat – The Shape of Water
This was the most difficult category for me – I would love to have been able to find space for such eclectic work as Max Richter’s music for Hostiles, Nitin Sawhney’s score for Breathe, Rachel Portman’s accompaniment to Their Finest, or Mica Levi’s contribution to Marjorie Prime. But I think this is the one category in which the Oscar voters and I may be in tune, with the prize on the night going to Hans Zimmer for his soul-shattering score for Dunkirk.
Will win: Hans Zimmer
–
Dunkirk
Peter Bradshaw, Guardian film critic
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
• Call Me By Your Name
• The Florida Project
• Get Out
• Phantom Thread
• The Shape of Water
Luca Guadagnino’s love story Call Me By Your Name, starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, seduces and overwhelms: the 80s-set story of a young man’s passionate adoration for the older grad student who has come to stay at his parents’ house in Italy. It has an unashamed sensuality which isn’t often available in the cinema, promoting the cultivation of knowledge and pleasure and making them the same thing. Its languorous caress is a marvel.
Will win: The Shape of Water
Best director
• Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
• Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
• Michael Haneke – Happy End
• Dee Rees – Mudbound
• Guillermo Del Toro – The Shape of Water
It’s fashionable to mock the idea of auteurisme, but Greta Gerwig brings a masterly personal control to this autobiographical coming-of-age comedy: her direction gets the very best from two great performers, Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, and her writing is zingingly terrific, both in its line-by-line pleasure and its narrative shape.
Will win: Guillermo Del Toro – The Shape of Water
Best actor
• Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
• Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
• Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
• Colin Farrell – The Killing of a Sacred Deer
• Jason Mitchell – Mudbound
Daniel Day-Lewis brings a gripping theatricality and self-awareness to this outrageously enjoyable performance, though without anything as obvious as camp. He plays a fictional 50s couturier for whom falling in love represents something he most fears: loss of control. Something to compare with Laurence Olivier in Rebecca or Orson Welles in The Third Man.
Will win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Best actress
• Kristen Stewart – Personal Shopper
• Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
• Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
• Jennifer Lawrence – Mother!
• Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
No fireworks, no grandstanding, but a quietly overwhelming performance of great intelligence and potency: the kind of acting that looks like real life. Stewart plays a fashion assistant — and she is also a medium, making contact with the ghost of her dead twin brother. It becomes a supernatural tale and a stalker nightmare. Stewart, in her superbly unaffected ordinariness, holds it together. Acting like this hardly ever wins prizes. But it should.
Will win: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actor
• Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
• Christopher Plummer – All the Money in the World
• Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me By Your Name
• Daniel Craig – Logan Lucky
• Fabrice Luchini – Slack Bay
Willem Dafoe is the gold standard for a certain kind of naturalistic acting: intelligent, understated, calmly centred, his face radiating a fierce compression of emotion and integrity. And so it is with his tremendous portrayal of the motel manager in The Florida Project: exasperated about the neglected kids, while looking out for them — and guilty about having neglected his own grownup son.
Will win: Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actress
• Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
• Catherine Keener – Get Out
• Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
• Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water
• Valeria Bruni Tedeschi – Slack Bay
Laurie Metcalf gives the performance of a lifetime as Lady Bird’s mother —passionate, devoted, controlling, a little jealous maybe, caught between the parent’s eternal dilemma of holding on and letting go. Her spasms of temper, sometimes poignant, sometimes cruel — and the counter-rages from her daughter — are compelling.
Will win: Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Other categories: best documentary
• City of Ghosts
• Safari
• Cameraperson
• Machines
• Whitney: Can I Be Me?
Matthew Heinemann’s documentary about the Isis stronghold of Raqqa in Syria is devastating — and absolutely indispensable. He recounts the struggle of the citizen-journalist collective called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, who uploaded video showing the brutality of Isis: beheadings, executions, mock crucifixions and Nazi-style placard shaming. They took on the theocrat-tyrants in the digital media war. An education.
Will win: City of Ghosts
Wendy Ide, Observer film writer
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
• Lady Bird
• 120 Beats Per Minute
• Call Me By Your Name
• The Florida Project
• Get Out
With this year’s wide-open best picture race and establishment-shaking revelations, there could hardly be a better moment for the Academy voters to venture out of their comfort zone. It has been a landmark year for LGBTQ-themed film-making: 120 BPM and Call Me By Your Name are exceptional. The Florida Project and Get Out tackle issues with originality. But my pick is Lady Bird, which, like its teenage central character, is raw, funny, infuriating and completely irresistible.
Will win: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best director
• Robin Campillo – 120 BPM
• Sean Baker – The Florida Project
• Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
• Luca Guadagnino – Call Me By Your Name
• Jordan Peele – Get Out
It’s perhaps incongruous to mention auteur cinema when talking about a film that so vibrantly and passionately celebrates collective voices. But Robin Campillo’s vision for 120 BPM, a thrillingly ambitious portrait of Aids activism in 1990s Paris, is present in every frame. Much as I loved the lush intimacy of Call Me By Your Name, and the horrifyingly honed tension of Get Out, it was Campillo’s work on 120 BPM that left me in pieces.
Will win: Christopher Nolan –
Dunkirk
Best actor
• Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name
• Claes Bang – The Square
• Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
• Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
• Makis Papadimitriou – Suntan
I’m not sure whether Timothée Chalamet’s assured performance in Call Me By Your Name is all the more remarkable because of his age – he only just turned 22 – or if his youth freed him up to give such a beguiling and uninhibited reading of the character. Either way, it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of acting I have seen this year. Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out is another standout for me.
Will win: Gary Oldman –
Darkest Hour
Best actress
• Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
• Frances McDormand – Three Billboards
• Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
• Kristen Stewart – Personal Shopper
• Daniela Vega – A Fantastic Woman
I can’t shake my fascination with Kristen Stewart’s mesmerising performance in Personal Shopper, although it’s unlikely to chime with the Academy. Another longshot, is trans actress Daniela Vega who is devastating in the role of a woman fighting for her right to grieve in A Fantastic Woman. The smouldering, almost feral intensity of Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth is a knockout. But Saoirse Ronan is my pick: her mercurial turn in Lady Bird gets more angular and intriguing every time I watch it.
Will win: Frances McDormand –
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actor
• Idris Elba – Molly’s Game
• Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
• Kelvin Harrison Jr – It Comes at Night
• Benny Safdie – Good Time
• Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me By Your Name
A great supporting performance might not be the showiest role, but it’s a crucial part of the architecture of a film. Take it away, and the picture will collapse. This is certainly true of Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project – his understated empathy pulls the film together. And Michael Stuhlbarg’s key scene in Call Me By Your Name is a pivotal moment in the movie. But this year, I was smitten by Idris Elba’s cracking, high-wire act of a performance in Molly’s Game.
Will win: Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me By Your Name
Best supporting actress
• Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
• Amira Casar – Call Me By Your Name
• Betty Gabriel – Get Out
• Rebecca Hall – Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
• Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
This year, the supporting actress category is all about the eyes. Betty Gabriel, weeping and smiling, is pure horror in Get Out, while Amira Casar’s searching look in Call Me By Your Name questions both the men in her life. There’s also the moment when Rebecca Hall falls for another woman. But Lesley Manville’s cold, appraising stare in Phantom Thread is like being stabbed with scissors. It’s a performance as immaculate as the tailoring of her dresses.
Will win: Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Other categories: best foreign language film
• On Body and Soul
• A Fantastic Woman
• Félicité
• Loveless
• The Square
The Academy has, in the past, had something of a tricky relationship with the foreign language category. Traditionally, the voters have proved resistant to anything too, well, foreign. So the chances of the top prize going to a magical realist romance set against the backdrop of a Hungarian abattoir are slim. But although I admired the bracing bleakness of Loveless and the crisp satire of The Square, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s gorgeous oddity On Body and Soul gets my vote.
Will win: In the Fade
Steve Rose, Guardian Film Writer
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
• The Florida Project
• Dunkirk
• Get Out
• Lady Bird
• The Shape Of Water
The impoverished, garishly coloured outskirts of Disney World were the perfect setting for a state-of-the-nation movie that combined the incompatible: sunny yet miserable, gritty yet fantastical, optimistic yet despairing. It’ll mostly likely be too unglamorous for the Academy but it was my kind of movie.
Will win: The Shape of Water
Best director
• Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
• Sean Baker – The Florida Project
• Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
• Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
• Denis Villeneuve – Blade Runner 2049
Dunkirk was so much the director’s film. There was barely any dialogue and individual performances took a back seat to the grand, ambitious storytelling. To find a novel, thrilling, cinematic, almost avant-garde way of telling what could have been a very familiar story is some achievement.
Will Win: Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Best actor
• Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
• Timothée Chalamet –Call Me By Your Name
• Jason Mitchell – Mudbound
• Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
• James McAvoy – Split
Everyone agrees it’s his year, and portraying a recognisable historical figure is basically route one to the award, but at the same time, Oldman really gets his teeth into the role, giving us a believably shaded, complex, nuanced Churchill, despite the layers of prosthetics.
Will Win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Best actress
• Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water
• Brooklynn Prince – The Florida Project
• Margot Robbie – I, Tonya
• Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
• Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Despite having no lines, Hawkins held the screen with her mischievous allure and dancer’s grace. Mute roles often require an excess of mugging, but Hawkins is such a smart, captivating performer she suggested hidden depths with great subtlety. She’s just got one of those faces, hasn’t she?
Will Win: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actor
• Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
• Ray Romano – The Big Sick
• Paul Walter Hauser – I, Tonya
• Richard Jenkins – The Shape of Water
• Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Such a generous, selfless performance from an actor who often tends to steal the limelight – especially considering he’s surrounded by amateurs and child actors. Dafoe’s motel manager was the father figure anchoring the whole film, grouchy and exasperated but ultimately protective.
Will win: Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actress
• Allison Janney – I, Tonya
• Tiffany Haddish – Girls Trip
• Gemma Jones – God’s Own Country
• Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
• Mary J Blige – Mudbound
As Tonya Harding’s permanently sour, chain-smoking, monstrously undermining, mother, Janney is a character – and a fancy-dress outfit – for the ages. She could have been a caricature: but Janney makes her a person – a terrible person. When she’s off screen, you’re just waiting for her to come back.
Will win: Allison Janney - I, Tonya
Best film editing
• Baby Driver
• Dunkirk
• Get Out
• The Shape Of Water
• Thor Ragnarok
It’s the least glamorous Oscar of the night, but Baby Driver really made you think about how hard good editing must be. Its car chases and gunfights were not only quick, precise and visually coherent, they were also perfectly synched to the soundtrack. That takes some doing.
Will win: Dunkirk
Simran Hans, Observer film writer
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
• Good Time
• Get Out
• 120 BPM
• The Florida Project
• Mudbound
Best picture winners tend to reflect the Academy’s mood, so it’s my suspicion that, in a post-Weinstein world, grungy crime thriller Good Time is too weird, too scuzzy and too small to make a real impact. Although the film is certainly of its time, I predict voters will plump for a “political” choice – or at least something with more telegraphed messaging. Get Out has a chance, given this year’s diverse cohort of voters, though Three Billboards seems the safe option.
Will win: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best director
• Jordan Peele – Get Out
• Dee Rees – Mudbound
• Josh and Benny Safdie – Good Time
• Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
• Robin Campillo – 120 BPM
I’m looking for displays of authored image-making and economical storytelling in this category. Rees and Campillo wield complicated historical moments (and sprawling ensemble casts), while the Safdies and Gerwig create tightly controlled universes that sing with specificity. For me, Peele is the most agile, moving between genres and using horror, comedy and magic realism – the “sunken place”, a genius concept, articulated visually and with flair – to explore the social issue of racism with confidence.
Will win: Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Best actor
• Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
• Nahuel Pérez Biscayart – 120 BPM
• Jamie Bell – Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
• Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name
• Robert Pattinson – Good Time
The Academy likes to award an actor for a body of work (and almost always the wrong film – I’m looking at you, Gary Oldman). I’d like to see actors recognised for character roles and rewarded for performances that are singular without necessarily being showy for showmanship’s sake. As for Kaluuya – his performance in Get Out is deceptively understated. It’s major: exact, moving, and one of the most carefully wrought I’ve seen in a long time.
Will win: Tom Hanks – The Post
Best actress
• Tiffany Haddish – Girls Trip
• Daniela Vega – A Fantastic Woman
• Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
• Brooklynn Kimberly Prince – The Florida Project
• Cynthia Nixon – A Quiet Passion
Although comedy acting is considerably trickier to pull off than method seriousness, it’s rare to see comedians acknowledged in performance categories. I worry that Tiffany Haddish’s turn as loud-mouthed grapefruit enthusiast Dina in Girls Trip might be written off as everyday ensemble raunch, but those who have seen the film will be aware of just how dexterous her performance is. Haddish has credibility, ease, screwball physicality and sheer star wattage in spades.
Will win: Frances McDormand - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actor
• Buddy Duress – Good Time
• Lil Rel Howery – Get Out
• Daniel Craig – Logan Lucky
• O’Shea Jackson Jr – Ingrid Goes West
• Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Howery, Craig and Jackson might seem like wildcards here, but all three are goofily loose and giddily funny in their small but neatly formed roles. Dafoe, on the other hand, is an awards-y choice, though he wouldn’t be a bad one – the way he modulates himself to suit non-actors Bria Vinaite and Brooklyn Prince requires skill worth celebrating. My pick? Safdie brothers stalwart Buddy Duress, a magnetic and deliciously unpredictable screen presence as a petty criminal in Good Time.
Will win: Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Best supporting actress
• Betty Gabriel – Get Out
• Taliah Lennice Webster – Good Time
• Mary J Blige – Mudbound
• Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
• Michelle Pfeiffer – Mother!
Lady Bird is a two-hander, so it’s annoying to have to shift Laurie Metcalf into the supporting actress category, despite her display of wit and precision as Lady Bird’s frustrated mother. For me, though, Betty Gabriel’s Georgina in Get Out was most memorable. Her portrayal of the house help, whose smiley compliance masks a truly sinister predicament, is a technical achievement that cleverly communicates the idea of assimilation as survival.
Will win: Allison Janney – I, Tonya
Other categories: best cinematography
• Hélène Louvart – Beach Rats
• Sean Price Williams – Good Time
• Hoyte van Hoytema – Dunkirk
• Darius Khondji – The Lost City of Z
• Dan Laustsen – John Wick: Chapter 2
Laustsen was director of photography for The Shape of Water, but it’s the slick neon world he fashioned in the John Wick sequel that I find more impressive. Although VFX has its own category, digital cinematography is often celebrated as boundary pushing by the Academy. Yet photochemical film is thriving, from the large-format 65mm used in Dunkirk to the grainy 16mm used by Hélène Louvart to tell Eliza Hittman’s intimate story of a queer teenager’s Coney Island summer.
Will win: Dan Laustsen – The Shape of Water
Guy Lodge, Observer film writer
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
• Phantom Thread
• The Florida Project
• Lady Bird
• The Lost City of Z
• Mother!
Paul Thomas Anderson’s swoon-worthy story of a toxic male creative ego meeting its match is, for me, the film of the year and one of the pre-eminent American auteur’s most exquisite achievements: sensual, literate, wildly funny, immaculately classical in construction, yet topical in its gender politics. Precursor awards suggest it’s too pristine, too perverse to crack the best picture race; in its absence, Greta Gerwig’s small, perfectly formed Lady Bird will have my heart.
Will win: Get Out
Best director
• Darren Aronofsky – Mother!
• Kitty Green – Casting JonBenét
• Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
• Andrey Zvyagintsev – Loveless
• Paul Thomas Anderson – Phantom Thread
Having snagged an all-important nod from the Directors Guild of America, Gerwig looks on track to become only the fifth woman in history to score a best director Oscar nomination. She could even take the prize, though she’ll need to overcome the Academy’s recent bias in this category toward swaggering technical showcases with a plethora of moving parts — a department in which Darren Aronofsky’s exhilaratingly demented, ever-expanding psychodrama deserves more credit than it has received.
Will win: Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Best actor
• Claes Bang – The Square
• Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
• Harris Dickinson – Beach Rats
• Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
• Channing Tatum – Logan Lucky
Bar the odd exception like Isabelle Huppert in last year’s Elle, outstanding foreign-language performances routinely struggle to gain traction on the infuriatingly anglocentric awards circuit. This explains why Danish star Bang, a deft, urbane, tragicomic revelation as an inwardly collapsing museum curator in Ruben Östlund’s The Square, hasn’t received an infinitesimal fraction of the attention given to Gary Oldman’s hoary,, latex-swaddled Winston Churchill impression in the unbearable Darkest Hour. Same as it ever was.
Will win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Best actress
• Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
• Kirsten Dunst – The Beguiled
• Sally Hawkins – Maudie
• Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
• Vicky Krieps – Phantom Thread
After a year in which women took control of Hollywood through the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, how gratifying that best actress is so richly contested. Of my choices, I expect only Ronan to make the Academy’s Oscar lineup, though Hawkins will be nominated for her heart-soaringly wordless turn in The Shape of Water; that I think she’s even better as the socially isolated, arthritis-crippled folk artist Maud Lewis shows what a career-crowning year she’s had.
Will win: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actor
• Jean-Louis Trintignant – Happy End
• Austin Abrams – Brad’s Status
• Michael Fassbender – Alien: Covenant
• O’Shea Jackson Jr – Ingrid Goes West
• Barry Keoghan – The Killing of a Sacred Deer
More often than not, this is a category the Academy uses to recognise strong, long-serving character actors they haven’t yet acknowledged. So it is that this looks like a neck-and-neck race between Sam Rockwell (really a lead in Three Billboards) and Willem Dafoe. The 87-year-old Jean-Louis Trintignant is my pie-in-the-sky candidate for such a win, but I was equally wowed by three bright millennial breakouts: Austin Abrams, Barry Keoghan and O’Shea Jackson Jr will surely have their day soon.
Will win: Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Best supporting actress
• Taliah Lennice Webster – Good Time
• Melissa Leo – Novitiate
• Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
• Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
• Elisabeth Moss – The Square
If you haven’t heard of Novitiate, that’s because Maggie Betts’s stirring, rigorously nuanced convent drama, pitting a draconian Tennessee nunnery against the Vatican’s mid-1960s church reform, has no scheduled UK release. A hit at Sundance last year, the film made scarcely a ripple in American cinemas: if it had, Melissa Leo’s stunning hellfire turn as a venomous Mother Superior would be reaping as many plaudits as Oscar frontrunners Metcalf and Allison Janney. Keep an eye out for it.
Will win: Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Other categories: best original screenplay
• 120 BPM
• The Killing of a Sacred Deer
• Lady Bird
• The Ornithologist
• Phantom Thread
While this year’s best adapted screenplay race is so sparse that James Ivory’s statuette for Call Me By Your Name has already been sent to the engravers, its original counterpart is so fiercely competitive it’s almost impossible to call. Lady Bird? Get Out? Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri? I’d plump for the sharp, lively rhetorical to-and-fro of 120 BPM, Robin Campillo’s riveting Aids-activist study, though after the film’s surprise omission from the foreign-film shortlist, that looks less likely than ever.
Will win: Get Out
