2024 acting Oscar winners boast 5th highest screen time average ever

Matthew Stewart
·4 min read
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By delivering performances that add up to almost four and a half hours, the four acting Oscar winners of 2024 came within six minutes of setting a new academy record for highest single-year screen time average. Ultimately, they landed in fifth place with a mean of one hour, four minutes, and 57 seconds, thus becoming only the 12th winning quartet (and sixth in 10 years) to exceed 60 minutes.

Newly crowned Best Actor and Actress champs Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”) and Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) are credited with a whopping 81% of their foursome’s screen time total, respectively clocking in at 1:53:10 and 1:37:19 and outpacing all of the 2024 nominees by at least four minutes. Supporting honorees Robert Downey Jr. (“Oppenheimer”) and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (“The Holdovers”) gave the fourth and sixth shortest nominated performances of the year, reaching individual screen times of 23:50 and 25:29.

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Considering this group’s screen time percentages, Downey’s (13.22%) comes closest to breaking a record, as only eight supporting actors have won for proportionally briefer performances. Given their films’ running time range of 133 to 180 minutes, their 40.96% average is the smallest since 2018 (39.84%) and is higher than 43 and lower than 44 of the ones that have applied to sets of four or more winners.

The winning group with the all-time highest physical screen time average are 1981’s Robert De Niro (“Raging Bull”), Sissy Spacek (“Coal Miner’s Daughter”), Timothy Hutton (“Ordinary People”), and Mary Steenburgen (“Melvin and Howard”), who land at one hour, 10 minutes, and 16 seconds. Given Hutton’s current status as the supporting male victor with the third most screen time (1:05:04), the leads in this case (who each pass the 90-minute mark) claim just 67% of the quartet’s collective total.

Ranking between the 1981 and 2024 groups are those from 1969 (1:09:04), 1940 (1:08:49), and 2020 (1:06:15), each of the first two of which includes a lead female turn that exceeds two hours: Barbra Streisand (“Funny Girl”; 2:01:02) and Vivien Leigh (“Gone with the Wind”; 2:23:32). Streisand’s Best Actress tie with Katharine Hepburn (“The Lion in Winter”) resulted in the only case of five performers clinching competitive trophies at a single Oscars ceremony, yielding a combined screen time of nearly six hours. The year’s supporting male champ, Jack Albertson (“The Subject Was Roses”), initially outranked all other winners in his category at 1:03:20 but presently sits in fifth place, several minutes behind leader Mahershala Ali (“Green Book,” 2019; 1:06:38).

In terms of actual time, Downey and Randolph’s performances are the 19th and 43rd shortest to win in their categories’ respective 88-year histories, with both falling at least five minutes below the overall supporting average. Murphy and Stone, on the other hand, nearly reach record-breaking territory by placing third out of 97 and fourth out of 99, each surpassing the general lead average by at least 29 minutes. The only Best Actor winners who outrank Murphy are Charlton Heston (“Ben-Hur,” 1960; 2:01:23) and Daniel Day-Lewis (“There Will Be Blood,” 2008; 1:57:00), while Stone only falls behind Leigh, Streisand, and Meryl Streep (“Sophie’s Choice,” 1983; 1:41:14).

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