2023 Academy Awards Nomination Breakdown: Best Supporting Actor

The Academy Awards are airing live on March 12, and for the first time, I have set out to break down every nominee in every category in order to assess, as accurately as I can, who and what has the best chance of winning. Today I will be discussing the nominees for Best Actor in a Supporting Role!

Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin

One of Ireland’s greatest actors, Brendan Gleeson stars as Colm in the film that reunited him with his In Bruges co-star Colin Farrell (also nominated this year, for Best Actor), in which Gleeson is asked to balance out Farrell’s hilarious foolishness and naiveté with a cool-headed rationale that you’re forced to accept, lest your suspension of belief completely shatter. Gleeson joins the actors that I was shocked to learn have not previously been nominated for an Academy Award, though he did star in Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-winning short film Six Shooter in 2004.

Read my review of The Banshees of Inisherin here.

Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Brian Tyree Henry is one of the best actors working today. In the underseen Apple TV+ release Causeway, he stars alongside Jennifer Lawrence as a pool cleaner that Lynsey (played by Lawrence) befriends upon her return to normalcy after military service. Henry turns in an incredible performance alongside Lawrence, and his character is a perfect representation of the fact that not all trauma is the same, and everyone deals with it in different ways. Everyone’s got baggage, and it’s not necessarily comparable; everyone should be able to deal with it in their own way. This is his first (well-deserved) Oscar nomination.

Read my review of Causeway here.

“Causeway” Paints an Intimate Picture of Trauma and Friendship (Review)

It’s been a long time since Jennifer Lawrence played a real human being. In the past seven years, she’s played a shapeshifting superhero, a Russian spy, a hyperbolic but hysteric truth-teller, and a religious allegory, but there’s been a distinct lack of grounded drama in her filmography ever since 2015’s Joy. This isn’t a bad thing (I tend to prefer genre films myself), but it’s been a noticeable mark on the career of a fantastic actress who had her big break with one such drama.

Image courtesy of Apple TV+

Now she’s back to the world of solemn stories that could very well be true with Causeway, a co-production of the ever-reliable Apple TV+ and A24 that begins slowly and subtly. We begin to understand that Lawrence plays Lynsey, a US soldier who suffered a brain injury while on the ground in Afghanistan, forced to return home and struggling to settle back into a mundane routine of daily life.