Who are the early Oscar and Bafta frontrunners in the acting categories?

At the Academy Awards ceremony in March, Everything Everywhere All At Once became only the third film ever to win three acting Oscars — joining the pantheon alongside A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951 and Network in 1977.

Last December, few would have anticipated that Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis and Ke Huy Quan would all win their categories — with only the latter name widely considered to be the favourite to win at that stage of the game.

In other words there is a lot to play for, with more than two months until the Bafta Film Awards and nearly three months until the Oscars ceremony. This guide to the buzz-worthy performances aims to broaden — not narrow — that conversation.

The differing tastes and voting processes at Oscar and Bafta adds some extra spice to the mix — after all, in 2023 the US and UK film academies anointed different winners in all four acting categories, with Oscar rewarding Brendan Fraser (The Whale) and the Everything Everywhere trio, and Bafta plumping for Cate Blanchett (Tár), Austin Butler (Elvis), and Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan (The Banshees Of Inisherin).

Leading actress

At a relatively youthful 35, Emma Stone has earned three acting Oscar nominations, winning for La La Land in 2017. We can expect her to increase that tally to four with her powerhouse performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, completing a wild arc from adult toddler to mature woman stepping into personal agency.

Stone faces competition from Killers Of The Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone — named best actress by the New York film critics. Playing a native American Osage woman whose oil wealth makes her a target for predatory white neighbours, Gladstone grounds Martin Scorsese’s historical drama with heartbreaking dignity.

Margot Robbie is almost certain to secure an Oscar nomination for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie in the best picture category, as producer. The question remains whether she will feature in the leading actress category. Robbie is a two-time Oscar nominee, for her roles in I, Tonya and Bombshell, and she repeated those feats at Bafta while also earning nods for Mary Queen Of Scots, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and in 2015 as a rising star.

Carey Mulligan — in contention this year for Bradley Cooper’s Maestro — has enjoyed a similar awards trajectory to Robbie, earning two Oscar nominations (for An Education and Promising Young Woman) and four Bafta nominations, including rising star in 2010. Her Maestro role as actress Felicia Montealegre, who marries Cooper’s philandering composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, could have been the kind of stoic spouse seen before in film biopics; and while that is a flavour of the role, the film is more generous to Mulligan than that, and she rises to meet the opportunity.

Germany’s Sandra Hüller delivers two arresting performances this year — in Anatomy Of A Fall and The Zone Of Interest. Both have a good shot at a nomination but the more broadly appealing is as the protagonist of Justine Triet’s Anatomy: a novelist who finds herself accused of her husband’s murder when he falls to his death at their French Alps home. Speaking both English and French in the film, it is a role that finally should win Hüller the attention of Hollywood.

Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple may score its biggest success in supporting actress and craft categories, but don’t dismiss lead actress Fantasia Barrino, as protagonist Celie, who travels through an arc of suffering before stepping into her power.

Also gunning for their first nominations are Cailee Spaeny for Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and Greta Lee for Celine Song’s Past Lives. These films announce their leading ladies as major talents — and it is possible they could join with Gladstone, Hüller and Barrino to effect a clean sweep of Oscar newcomers in the five nominations for best actress.

Spaeny and Lee are nominated for a Golden Globe in the actress (drama) category alongside Gladstone, Mulligan, Huller (for Anatomy Of A Fall) and also Annette Bening for Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s true tale Nyad. Stone, Barrino and Robbie are all Globe-nominated for actress (musical or comedy), as are Natalie Portman for Todd Haynes’ May December, Jennifer Lawrence for Gene Stupnitsky’s raunchy comedy No Hard Feelings and Alma Pöysti for Aki Kaurismaki’s off-kilter romance Fallen Leaves.

Leading actor

Cillian Murphy has previously acted in well-regarded Christopher Nolan films — such as Inception and The Dark Knight — that have achieved multiple Bafta and Oscar nominations/wins, but he has won relatively little attention from these two academies. (From Bafta, he does have a 2023 nomination for TV’s Peaky Blinders, and he was nominated as a rising star in 2007.) It would be a big upset if that does not change this time around, thanks to his commanding turn in Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

Maestro’s Bradley Cooper, Killers Of The Flower Moon’s Leonardo DiCaprio and The Holdovers’ Paul Giamatti are earning buzz for films that premiered respectively at Venice, Cannes and Telluride. DiCaprio has six Oscar nominations for acting, winning in 2016 for The Revenant, and his stats are the same at Bafta. Cooper has four acting Oscar nods and nine nominations overall, including as director, screenwriter and producer, but zero wins so far. Giamatti has one Oscar nomination (2006 for Cinderella Man) but nothing so far at Bafta.

Murphy, Cooper and DiCaprio are all playing real-life figures (albeit a relatively obscure one in the latter case), and they face competition in the category from Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin, the political activist who organised the 1963 March on Washington and who faced marginalisation within the civil rights struggle because of his homosexuality. Rustin reteams him with director George C Wolfe, whose Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom secured five Oscar nominations and two wins in 2021.

Like Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright is in a fictional role — in Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, as a professor and author who as a prank writes a pseudonymous novel pandering to notions of ghetto Black authenticity, and gets caught up in a publishing sensation. The film won the people’s choice award at Toronto, and a rising tide of voter enthusiasm could carry Wright to his first Oscar and Bafta nominations.

The same might be said for Andrew Scott in Andrew Haigh’s gay romance/family drama All Of Us Strangers — a film that is, anecdotally, enjoying traction with voters in the UK. Last year, UK indie drama Aftersun saw Paul Mescal (who supports Scott in Strangers) earn best actor Oscar and Bafta nominations, and Scott may follow this trajectory.

The 2023 awards season saw Barry Keoghan earn an Oscar nomination and a Bafta win for his inspired supporting turn in The Banshees Of Inisherin and he delivers a similarly impactful performance in Saltburn, this time in the leading role. Fennell’s genre-blending film may divide audiences; Keoghan’s watchful, artfully devious performance less so.

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is likewise triggering an array of different responses, as is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in the title role, one that is more interested in digging into the French emperor’s flaws and weaknesses than in celebrating the conqueror of Europe.

Cooper, DiCaprio, Domingo, Keoghan, Murphy and Scott are all Golden Globe-nominated for best actor (drama). Phoenix as Napoleon did not land a Golden Globe nomination but he did earn one in the best actor (musical or comedy) category for his performance in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid. He is nominated alongside Giamatti and Wright, plus also Nicolas Cage for Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, Timothée Chalamet for Paul King’s Wonka and Matt Damon for Ben Affleck’s Air.

Also in contention

Actress

• Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Shayda
• Leonie Benesch, The Teachers’ Lounge
• Jessica Chastain, Memory
• Phoebe Dynevor, Fair Play
• Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Origin

Actor

• Adam Driver, Ferrari
• Zac Efron, The Iron Claw
• Franz Rogowski, Passages
• Teo Yoo, Past Lives

Bafta plays, performance categories

• Jodie Comer, The End We Start From
• Anthony Hopkins, One Life
• David Jonsson, Rye Lane
• Mia McKenna-Bruce, How To Have Sex
• Vivian Oparah, Rye Lane
• Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Femme
• Tilda Swinton, The Eternal Daughter

Supporting actress

Right now it is a toss-up regarding which of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Nyad veteran actresses has the bigger chance of serious awards attention — Annette Bening in lead playing the titular long-distance swimmer or Jodie Foster in support as her best friend and coach. Bening has four Oscar nominations (the most recent for The Kids Are All Right in 2011) but no wins, while Foster has converted two of her four nominations into awards, but has not been nominated since 1995, for Nell.

Natalie Portman (lead) and Julianne Moore (supporting) in Todd Haynes’ May December present a similar conundrum. Moore and Foster must both contend against New York critics’ pick Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who makes a sensational bid for her first Oscar and Bafta nominations, playing a school cook opposite Paul Giamatti in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. Her character — and performance — is the film’s warmest flavour and its stealth weapon.

She faces competition from two actresses who both bring essential dynamism to The Color Purple: Danielle Brooks as Sofia and Taraji P Henson as Shug, characters who empower and encourage embattled protagonist Celie. Oprah Winfrey, Margaret Avery and Whoopi Goldberg all achieved Oscar nominations in 1986 for their roles in Steven Spielberg’s film, and history could be repeated for Bazawule’s version.

For sheer impact on a film, and for performing a role that surely nobody else could have done better, Rosamund Pike makes a mark with her hilarious turn as Lady Elspeth Catton in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. Pike has one nomination apiece so far at Oscar and Bafta with Gone Girl in 2015, and must be considered a threat this year, especially at the Baftas.

The main supporting actresses of ‘Barbenheimer’ — America Ferrera (Barbie) and Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer) — could both land nominations at Oscar and/or Bafta, especially if voters seek to broadly reward two films that have proved so winning with audiences, between them delivering $2.4bn in global box office. Blunt has three Bafta film nominations, including rising star in 2007, but has yet to be nominated at Oscar.

While Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest does not offer Sandra Hüller the same expansive canvas as Anatomy Of A Fall, she deserves particular credit for her ability to captivate in a story that is setting itself against conventional narrative conventions.

In Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Penelope Cruz is winning hearts as Enzo Ferrari’s wife Laura, a grieving mother who stands up for herself in a fractured marriage.

Blunt, Brooks, Foster, Moore, Pike and Randolph are the six names landing a Golden Globe nomination for supporting actress – meaning that Ferrera, Henson, Cruz did not make the cut with Globes voters. Hüller landed a Globe nomination – but only in lead actress for Anatomy Of A Fall.

Supporting actor

Over a long and admired career, Robert Downey Jr has previously chalked up a pair of nominations apiece at both the US Academy and Bafta Film Awards, converting Chaplin into a Bafta win in 1993.

Right now, he is widely considered a frontrunner in supporting actor for his turn as US Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer, anchoring one of the film’s main plot strands.

To win his first Oscar, Downey Jr will need to see off a challenge from Barbie’s Ryan Gosling. The actor can count on voter support for his good-sport performance as the disempowered hunk pining for female attention — and has the advantage that Ken is a character with a notably expansive and transformative arc. Gosling previously has two Oscar and one Bafta nominations.

Robert De Niro won the Oscar with his very first nomination (in 1975, as supporting actor in The Godfather: Part II), winning the lead in 1981 with Raging Bull. He has a further five Oscar nominations for acting and one for best picture. Killers Of The Flower Moon puts him in the frame once more, if voters warm to his turn as a callous plunderer hiding behind a genial veneer of respect for racial difference.

With Poor Things, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe could both secure supporting actor Oscar nominations — just as Keoghan and Brendan Gleeson both did in this category in 2023 with Banshees; as Kodi Smit-McPhee and Jesse Plemons did in 2022 with The Power Of The Dog; as LaKeith Stanfield and winner Daniel Kaluuya did in 2021 with Judas And The Black Messiah; and as Joe Pesci and Al Pacino did in 2020 with The Irishman. Paul Mescal is also vying with his Strangers co-star Jamie Bell for the attention of voters — recognition that may be more easily won at Bafta. Are we headed for a pair of supporting actor Oscar nominations from the same film for the fifth year in a row?

Looking to shake up this category are newcomer Dominic Sessa in The Holdovers and Charles Melton (named best supporting actor by the New York Film Critics Circle) in May December. Then there is Colman Domingo as abusive husband Mister in The Color Purple, plus Sterling K Brown with an eye-catching turn as the protagonist’s gay brother in American Fiction.

Poor Things’ Dafoe and Ruffalo, plus also De Niro, Downey Jr, Gosling and Melton are the six names landing a Golden Globe nomination for supporting actor – meaning that the All Of Us Strangers male duo lost out, as did The Holdovers’ Sessa and American Fiction’s Brown. Domingo’s Globe nomination is for his leading actor work in Rustin.

As ever, there are more exceptional performances than there are slots on the Oscar and Bafta ballots — creating nervous times ahead for awards campaigners.

Also in contention 

Supporting actress

• Erika Alexander, American Fiction
• Juliette Binoche, The Taste Of Things
• Viola Davis, Air
• Claire Foy, All Of Us Strangers
• Vanessa Kirby, Napoleon
• Cara Jade Myers, Killers Of The Flower Moon

Supporting actor

• Jacob Elordi, Priscilla
• Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry
• Holt McCallany, The Iron Claw
• Chris Messina, Air
• Jesse Plemons, Killers Of The Flower Moon
• Peter Sarsgaard, Memory 

Bafta plays, supporting performance categories

• Richard E Grant, Saltburn
• Glenda Jackson, The Great Escaper
• George MacKay, Femme