Awards season loves a supporting category because it's where movies hide their sharpest knives. These six turns come from cohort films already on ActorRating — no padding, no Parasite placeholders waiting on cast ingest. Score them as performances that had to share the poster and still changed the temperature.
#01
Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer (2023)
Strauss is patronage with a long memory. Downey Jr. spends half the film as a helpful peer and half as a man rewriting the record. Supporting on the call sheet; structural in the edit. If you only remember the Trinity test, go back for the hearing — that's where this performance sharpens.
