For decades, it wasn't unusual to see two thespians from the same film nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but the same couldn't be said about its brother category. That was until recently when double-dipping in Supporting Actor became fashionable.
It started in 2017, with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri's Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson. In 2019, it was Joe Pesci and Al Pacino for The Irishman, and then Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeit Stanfield for Judas and the Black Messiah in 2020. The following year, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee did the honors for The Power of the Dog, while, in 2022, The Banshees of Inisherin got in with Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan. For comparison, in the same period, Supporting Actress only had two such cases, with The Favourite and last year's Everything Everywhere All At Once. Now, the question is whether the trend will continue at the 96th Academy Awards…
The likeliest candidate is Poor Things, the latest Golden Lion winner, and a critical darling through and through. As Eric Blume wrote, Willem Dafoe is both a star and a journeyman actor, a respected name within the industry who came close to winning with The Florida Project. The after-effects of that season resulted in a subsequent, somewhat surprising, nod for At Eternity's Gate. It seems probable that he'll be in the race once more for playing the Frankenstein-like creator of Emma Stone's Bella Baxter. In the same film, Mark Ruffalo plays the rakish lawyer she runs off with, setting himself up for a possible fourth career nomination.
But even if Lanthimos' pseudo-Victorian fantasy doesn't double dip, there's another, less obvious candidate in the run. It's Oppenheimer, for whom Universal is only campaigning two names for Best Supporting Actor. It's bad news for the likes of David Krumholtz, Josh Hartnett, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Clarke, and Macon Blair. However, it's brilliant for Matt Damon, who may ride the coattails of Robert Downey Jr. on the way to Academy gold. It will depend on how much AMPAS embraces Christopher Nolan's blockbuster biopic, if their support will extend past present expectations and deliver a truly staggering nomination count.
If you were to nominate two supporting actors from the same film this year, who would you pick?