The Best Supporting Actor Oscar category could see an unprecedented 5 straight years of double nominees

Lately, the Best Supporting Actor Oscar lineup has been seeing double — as in two nominees from one film. That looks likely to continue this season, and if that happens, it’ll mark an unprecedented five-year streak of double bids in the category.

Oscar nuts know this double-dipping wasn’t so rampant until very recently. There was a 26-year drought between 1991’s “Bugsy” yielding noms for Harvey Keitel and Ben Kingsley and 2017’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” ending the dry spell with bids for Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell. There were no co-star nominees the next year, but since then, it’s been duo after duo.

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2019’s “The Irishman” earned comeback nominations for Al Pacino and Joe Pesci. The subsequent year, Oscar voters threw a curveball by nominating both Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield — aka the people who played the title characters of “Judas and the Black Messiah” — in supporting. “The Power of the Dog” followed with dual bids for Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee. And last year’s “The Banshees of Inisherin” saw Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan shortlisted.

This year, there are a few films that could secure two spots in a category that once seemed allergic to them. At the moment, “Poor Things” is the one expected to achieve that feat. The Yorgos Lanthimos film, which stars Emma Stone, debuted to raves at the Telluride and Venice Film Festivals, winning the Golden Lion at the latter. Since then, “Poor Things” and all its key players have climbed up the odds, including Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe, who now sit in fourth and fifth place, respectively, in the supporting actor rankings behind frontrunner Robert Downey Jr. (“Oppenheimer”), Robert De Niro (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Ryan Gosling (“Barbie”). Both are respected veterans with multiple nominations under their belts, and if “Poor Things” goes over as big with the industry as it did with critics and festival audiences, you can for sure expect those double noms.

SEE Telluride Film Festival: ‘Poor Things’ thrusts Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo into the awards race

Before “Poor Things'” ascension, the common thought was that either “Oppenheimer” or “Flower Moon” would produce two nominees. The Roberts — both playing the antagonists of their respective films — feel safe (or as safe as they can be in late September) as part of presumably top three Best Picture contenders, especially RDJ since “Oppenheimer” is closing in on $950 million worldwide and is now the highest-grossing biopic of all time. Whether any of their co-stars can join them is up in the air and there are several factors in play.

“Oppenheimer” boasts a whole lotta men, so if you assume Downey is in, there are many options for the second nominee and everyone might have a different favorite, which means no one else might make it. Matt Damon has the next biggest supporting role and is in ninth place. He could also benefit from “Air,” for which he is a long shot to get a Best Actor bid. For a while, Plemons was in the top five for “Flower Moon,” but he has since fallen to 12th. As BOI (later FBI) agent Tom White, Plemons enters the story toward the end of the three-and-a-half-hour epic. His late arrival and minimal screen time could hurt or he could be one of the last things voters remember from the film.

If one movie does score two supporting actor slots, it’ll be the first time a category has seen double nominees for five consecutive years — the irony being that it would not occur in Best Supporting Actress, the most common category for double noms with 36 cases and two blocks of four-year streaks. Thus far, 22 films have yielded co-star nominees in Best Supporting Actor and only seven times has a co-star won, the two most recent being Rockwell and Kaluuya.

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