Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners

The latest Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winner is Robert Downey, Jr. for his role in Oppenheimer.
The latest Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winner is Robert Downey, Jr. for his role in Oppenheimer.

Want to know the best Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners?  How about the worst Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners?  Curious about Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners box office grosses or which Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which one got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place because we have all of that information.

Drivel Part: (That is what my wife calls this part of the page).  A few years ago, we wrote three movie pages on Oscar winners: Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress.  Originally we had intended on doing more Oscar winners pages….we sadly dropped the ball on that thought process.  Well with the calendar turning to November, and our favorite time of the year officially starting….”Movie Award Season” we figured we would finally revisit these movie subjects.  Our favorite Best Supporting Actor trivia?  Michael Caine is one of 7 different actors to win more than one Best Supporting Actor Oscar.  Those 7 actors are Walter Brennan (3 wins), Anthony Quinn, Peter Ustinov, Melvyn Douglas, Jason Robards, Christoph Waltz and Caine

Since 1936, there have been over 80 Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners. This page will rank Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winning movies from Best to Worst in five different sortable columns of information.  If you use the sort and search buttons the massive table becomes very interactive.

Walter Brennan in The Westerner (1940). His 3rd Best Supporting Oscar win.
Walter Brennan in The Westerner (1940). His 3rd Best Supporting Oscar win. He won the 3 of the first 5 Best Supporting Actor Oscars.

Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners Can Be Ranked 5 Ways In The Table Below

The really cool thing about ther table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners by the winners
  • Sort Best Supporting Actor Winners by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners by critic reviews and audiences voting.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar nominations and how many Oscar® wins each movie received
  • Sort Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score.  UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.  The ceiling to earn points for box office is $200 million…once a movie passes that mark it stops earning points in that category.
 
Michael Caine in his 2nd Best Supporting Actor Oscar rp;e ....1999's The Cider House Rules
Michael Caine in his 2nd Best Supporting Actor Oscar role ….1999’s The Cider House Rules

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29 thoughts on “Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners

  1. With our new Joseph Schildkraut page being completed….we are down to 3 Best Supporting Actors left to write an UMR page on.

    Hugh Griffith
    George Chakiris
    Mark Rylance

  2. With our new James Dunn page being completed….we are done to 4 Best Supporting Actors left to write an UMR page on.

    Hugh Griffith
    George Chakiris
    Mark Rylance
    Joseph Schildkraut

  3. “Ah sweet mystery of life at last I’ve found thee!
    At last I know the secret of it all!”

    DAILY BEAST DEC 15 2019: HOW MARLON BRANDO FORCED HOLLYWOOD TO FACE RACISM

    In 1973, Marlon Brando turned down an Oscar, and the whole world turned on him, calling him an ingrate, a dilettante, a publicity hound, a traitor. But for Brando the country under Richard Nixon was in a constitutional crisis, and systemic racism was undercutting the American Dream.

    Under these conditions, Marlon Brando believed, business as usual would be complicit with the problem. However Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston [who was actually Brando’s personal friend] called a press conference immediately after the ceremony ended and openly criticised the Method actor.

    Richard Nixon’s private “Watergate” tapes would later reveal that he was furious over the fact that Time magazine had put Brando on its cover (for Last Tango in Paris) instead of Nixon himself during the week of his own second inauguration. John Wayne ultimately got up in public and baldly stated that Hollywood would never apologize for its depiction of the Indians.

    And Clint Eastwood sarcastically read out at another awards ceremony that someday he might refuse an award in protest at the cowboys that Indians had killed on the screen. At least the likes of Wayne, Peck, Heston and Eastwood had the courage to openly criticize Brando, and JUST because of that one matter, but over the coming years others like the songwriter and movie critic Joel Hirschhorn were covertly hostile, choosing to savagely attack Brando through unparalleled criticism of his work and the huge fees Hollywood paid him following his back-to-back renaissance in Last Tango in Paris and The Godfather

    1. DAILY BEAST ARTICLE CONTINUED: Nearly half a century later with the2 019/20 Oscars coming up, can we understand Brando’s reasons better? At the 1973 Oscars the camera had swung to a young woman with long black hair and a traditional Indian buckskin dress making her way to the stage. “Accepting the award for Marlon Brando in The Godfather,” the announcer intoned, “is Miss Sacheen Littlefeather.” The camera caught the people in the audience following her with their eyes. Littlefeather took the microphone and explained Brando could not accept the Oscar because of Hollywood’s attitudes to the Indians to great boos from members of the audience. The audience included many of that year’s contenders such as Oscar nominee [for Sleuth] Michael Caine, a supporter of the British Conservative party

      Later backstage, Littlefeather spotted a furious John Wayne. For years to come, the diminutive young woman would remember how the big, strapping Wayne had to be physically “restrained by six security guards” from confronting her; because Brando’s position on the awards had gone even further than George C Scott’s tirade in 1970. Brando’s was less a critique of the Academy than a declaration on how citizens in the public eye ought to conduct themselves in a time of national crisis, which Brando genuinely felt the early 1970s to be.

      Looking back on this moment, Brando subsequently said, the boos at the Academy Awards ceremony weren’t meant for Littlefeather. They were meant for him. “They were booing because they thought, ‘This moment is sacrosanct, and you’re ruining our fantasy with intrusion of a little reality.”

      Today [thanks maybe in part to the attitudes of influential progressive Hollywood icons like Martin Scorsese, Tom Hanks and George Clooney] it is no longer considered “extreme” to make a stand in Hollywood against racism both on and off screen. Back then Brando used the right forum, the right audience, the right moment to draw attention to a cause that has been too long neglected; and ultimately even John Wayne was forced to backtrack on some of his own attitudes to Indians in the movies

  4. I have just seen the full Oscar nominations list for 2019 movies and thought it was unfair that Joachim Phoenix was nominated for Joker when Jared Leto’s tour de force back in 2016 was ignored.

    At least Margot Robbie [who also missed out in 2016 for Harley Quinn] gets a supporting actress nom this time round for Bombshell; and who knows what glory Birds of Prey will ultimately bring Margot? Things look promising at the moment-

    “BIRDS OF PREY MOST ANTICIPATED 2020 MOVIE
    IMDB has revealed its list of the top ten most-anticipated movies of 2020. and Birds of Prey is the movie that people are most excited to see in 2020, which is more good news for Warner Bros. and DC Films. Birds of Prey sees the return of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn and also features Ewan McGregor as the villain Black Mask. Rest of the Top 10 are-

    2/Sonic the Hedgehog
    3/Top Gun Maverick
    4/No Time to Die- Yawn! Yawn!
    5/Black Widow
    6/Mulan- live remake
    7/Wonder Woman 1984 – at last something for W o C
    8/Dune
    9/The King’s Men- not another drama about those English Royals?
    10/Fast and Furious 9 – still not enough of them!

    1. Hey Bob….I did not realize the Oscar nominations were yesterday morning….I am so disappointed that I missed them….normally I go through great efforts to see them. Interesting points about the Joker roles. Leto got good reviews for Suicide Squad…but generally it got some bad reviews. I think Joker is more of a drama than a comic book story….so the Academy was able to vote for Phoenix’s Joker. He is currently the front runner to win the Oscar…but I suspect….Adam Driver might pull off a surprise win. Good information…as always.

      1. HI BRUCE:Thanks for your response and thoughts on poetential Oscar love. Yes: I too was surprised when this time you missed the Oscar nom boat; and in fact I checked out your site first several times before scouring the wider net.

        I see that Hanks is nominated for a SUPPORTING role in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Does the fact that it is not the lead mean that “The Curse” has finally caught up with Tom. I would point out however that Hanks still get first billing in the movie though you credit it with a poor $58 million gross.

        Little Al has also been nominated for a supporting Oscar for The Irishman. He got a supporting actor nom for Godpop 1972 long ago; and probably would have got nominated, and might have won, in the leading actor character in that movie had not Brando been in it: Al was on screen I think more time than anypone else in the movie. Indeed here’s what iMDB has to say on the subject.

        “Pacino did not attend the ceremony in protest of perceived category fraud. As his performance reflected greater screen time than that of his co-star Marlon Brando, Pacino believed he should have received a nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role.”

        I woinder if Joel coaxed Al into staying away? If so it backfired because of course The Great Mumbler also stayed away in protest! Anyway Keep safe.

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