All 5 Supporting Actress Nominees at the 2026 Oscars, Ranked

This year's Oscar nominees in the Best Supporting Actress category are a varied bunch, an impressive group that includes some of the absolute best performances in 2025 films. The class of 2026 includes great established actresses, breakthrough roles, and four first-time nominees. It's a groundbreaking year, too, as this category features two nominees from a single international film, while two other nominees come from horror films, which used to be mostly ignored by the Academy Awards.This year, all five nominees in this category are fantastic — and actually supporting players, which is refreshing considering how much fraud we often see in the category. Any one of them would be a worthy winner. With five great performances to choose from, let's rank the nominees in this year's Best Supporting Actress category.

5 Elle Fanning - 'Sentimental Value'

Since the beginning of her career, Elle Fanning has done tremendous work in everything from 20th Century Women, The Neon Demon, The Beguiled, and A Complete Unknown. Fanning’s performance in Sentimental Value is somehow her first Oscar nomination, but it also is a reminder that she is one of our best young actors. Fanning plays Rachel Kemp, a Hollywood actress brought in by filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) to play a part originally intended for his daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve).

Fanning gives one of her best performances yet in a role that asks her to be vulnerable in her worries that she’s not what Gustav’s film is calling for, while also trying to somewhat find a middle ground between her own performance and portraying Nora. It's a role that could’ve been played as an outsider coming into the Borg family and causing tension, but her warmth and care in doing Gustav’s story justice ensure that that’s never the case. In a lesser year, it’s easy to see how Fanning’s performance could have been the frontrunner in this category, but it seems extremely unlikely this will be the last we see of Elle Fanning at the Oscars.

4 Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas - 'Sentimental Value’

Sentimental Value is a story very much about a father and his two daughters, and the thread tying them all together is Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas’s Agnes. She’s Nora’s rock during the tough times, and Gustav’s closest tie to his family. As Gustav’s sometimes research assistant and the star of one of his films when she was younger, Agnes is the one who sees both sides of the coin that is Gustav: yes, he hasn’t been there for his family as much as he should be, but she also knows the art is important to him and how this struggle of not being there has impact him, whether he realizes it or not.

Lilleaas’ performance is easily the most subtle of these five, a quiet tempest brewing throughout the film due to small frustrations and aggressions from her father. Considering how tremendous Lilleaas is here, truly one of the breakouts of 2025, it’s shocking that this is only her sixth film. Upon rewatch, Lilleaas’ performance as Agnes only grows more complex and impressive, the secret key to what makes Sentimental Value work so beautifully.

3 Wunmi Mosaku - ‘Sinners’

Speaking of breakout roles, Wunmi Mosaku has been around for a while, a stand-out in shows like Lovecraft Country and Loki, as well as roles in movies as varied as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Deadpool & Wolverine, and starring in the indie Netflix horror, His House. But in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Mosaku commands the screen from her first scene as Annie, with her intense romance with Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke, and the heartbreaking loss she still struggles with following the passing of their infant daughter.

Mosaku’s performance is one of the many things that elevate Sinners from more than just a vampire horror film, as early on, she gives this story an immense amount of heart, as we see the tragedy that weighs over both Annie and Smoke. It’s also incredibly likely that this group wouldn’t survive for half as long without her knowledge of Hoodoo practices and how to protect the juke joint from those trying to get inside. In a film full of outstanding supporting performances, Mosaku is the soul Coogler’s film needs to make this into one of the best of 2025.

2 Amy Madigan - ‘Weapons’

Compared to the other performances on this list, Amy Madigan’s unnerving take as Gladys has the least amount of screen time. But it’s a testament to how haunting and unsettling Madigan is in Zach Cregger’s Weapons that her role looms over the rest of the film. In less than fifteen minutes, Madigan crafts an entirely new classic horror character, one that seeps into your skin and doesn’t let go. Even when she’s not on screen, her presence is felt, the terrifying orchestrator of what happened to the seventeen missing children central to Weapons’ story.

Madigan’s role is the type that immediately shifts the film on its head, giving us answers to the questions we’ve had, while also making us even more curious about what the hell her deal is. Few performances in the year leave quite the impact that Madigan has in Weapons, but it’s one of the roles that 2025 will likely be remembered for. A horror film hasn’t won in the Best Supporting Actress category since Ruth Gordon won for Rosemary’s Baby in 1969, but we could very easily see that change this year.

1 Teyana Taylor - ‘One Battle After Another’

Teyana Taylor’s role as the incredibly-named Perfidia Beverly Hills is the definition of a great supporting role. Even though Taylor only appears in One Battle After Another’s first act, Perfidia completely puts this story in motion and dominates every single scene she’s in. Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is packed with great actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, and many others, but Taylor’s performance makes you hope that she’s just around the corner in any given scene, ready to pop back out and completely shake up 2025’s best film.

Much like in her tremendous lead role in A Thousand and One, it’s impossible to take your eyes off Taylor here, whether she’s letting a bank robbery go too far or itching to leave her family behind to continue the revolution on her own. Perfidia is a mystery that can’t be solved, and rather than being an underwritten character, it’s a testament to Taylor’s performance that she’s too layered to completely unlock, too unwieldy to be held down, and too captivating that featuring her in a larger capacity might overwhelm the story. One Battle After Another’s other acting nominees all already have their Oscars; it’s time for Taylor to get her own.