Is Zoe Saldaña the best supporting actress Oscar winner ever? We rank them.

USA Today

04-03-2025

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Best actress contenders arguably get more of the Oscar spotlight, but the supporting actress category at the Academy Awards always gives us scene-stealing winners that pop off the screen in amazing ways.
Sometimes it's a mother who's nowhere near maternal, like in Mo'Nique in 'Precious' or Allison Janney in 'I, Tonya." Other times it's the showstopping highlight of a movie musical – for example, Jennifer Hudson making 'Dreamgirls' her own or Catherine Zeta-Jones killing showtunes in 'Chicago.' And interestingly the newest supporting actor winner, Zoe Saldaña, marries song-and-dance charms with the drama of a lawyer caught in a tough spot in "Emilia Pérez."
How does Saldaña compare with past winners like Viola Davis and Anne Hathaway? We're ranking every best supporting actress of the past 25 years.
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25. Patricia Arquette, 'Boyhood' (2015)
Filming over 12 years with the same actors, Richard Linklater's coming-of-age tale is innovative in its making. Arquette's performance is more simple but just as effective, giving hope and soul to a divorced single mom trying to do her best for her kids but with a tendency to bring home the wrong guys.
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24. Melissa Leo, 'The Fighter' (2011)
The true-life sports biopic unleashes Leo as Alice, the loud, over-the-top matriarch of a large Boston family and manager mom to Micky Ward, a championship boxing contender trained by his drug-addict pugilist half-brother Dicky. The siblings butt heads and trade fists, though no one throws verbal barbs like Leo.
23. Alicia Vikander, 'The Danish Girl' (2016)
Eddie Redmayne has the showier role as 19th-century trans pioneer Lili Elbe, the first person known to receive gender confirmation surgery. Still, Vikander is no slouch, giving a heartbreaking performance as the wife (and fellow painter) who never falters in being there for her spouse.
22. Rachel Weisz, 'The Constant Gardener' (2006)
Weisz's righteous, emotional performance grounds the high stakes involved in the thriller, based on the John le Carré novel. Ralph Fiennes is a British diplomat trying to solve the murder of his activist wife (Weisz) in Kenya, where she uncovers a conspiracy involving the pharmaceutical industry.
21. Renée Zellweger, 'Cold Mountain' (2004)
The love story of a Confederate deserter (Jude Law) journeying back to his North Carolina home and his love (Nicole Kidman) drives the Civil War drama. Also key is another relationship, as Zellweger brings Southern verve and a bit of eccentricity to a spirited farmer who strikes up a close bond with Kidman's character.
20. Marcia Gay Harden, 'Pollock' (2001)
The Jackson Pollock biopic cast Ed Harris as the famous title painter and Harden as his artist wife, Lee Krasner. While the film honestly portrays how Pollock's drinking and womanizing affect his marriage, Harden searingly delivers as the two clash over his issues, including one scene where Lee strongly refuses to have children with him.
19. Yuh-jung Youn, 'Minari' (2021)
Many filmgoers had never seen "the Meryl Streep of South Korea' until Youn delivered a touching, electric performance as a caring grandma in the family drama. She's also the most American of this bunch, watching pro wrestling and pounding Mountain Dew when not bonding over planting herbs with her precocious grandson.
18. Jamie Lee Curtis, 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' (2023)
Curtis, the original "Halloween" final girl and blockbuster Hollywood star, dove into the multiverse of absurdity in "Everything" and absolutely made it her own. She stole scenes as an acerbic IRS agent and a significant other with hot dog fingers in the mind-blowing movie, yet won hearts in a memorable laundromat convo with Michelle Yeoh.
17. Jennifer Connelly, 'A Beautiful Mind' (2002)
Ron Howard's biopic about mathematician John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) tracks how his work in cryptography with the government severely affects his mental health. The love story in the tale is just as important thanks to Connelly, who plays Nash's wife Alicia as she reminds him of what's real in his most trying times.
16. Tilda Swinton, 'Michael Clayton' (2008)
Swinton and George Clooney make exceptional adversaries in the engrossing legal thriller. Clooney plays a fixer hired to clean up a crisis involving an agricultural company's shady dealings while Swinton is all nervy unease as the corporation's lawyer trying to keep it together amid a series of bad deeds.
15. Cate Blanchett, 'The Aviator' (2005)
One movie legend channels another one in the Howard Hughes biopic. Blanchett is fabulous as Katharine Hepburn opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and she's the most magnetic presence onscreen, whether the mercurial Kate is breaking down Hughes' golf game or being a steadying love interest before his descent into madness.
14. Penélope Cruz, 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' (2009)
Woody Allen's romantic comedy stars Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as friends who travel to Spain and are seduced by a local painter (Javier Bardem). It's a pretty straightforward love triangle situation until Cruz arrives, all unhinged chaos, as the artist's unstable ex who enjoyably livens up the relationship dynamics.
13. Laura Dern, 'Marriage Story' (2020)
Dern is the mercurial force of nature that's desperately needed in Noah Baumbach's emotionally devastating relationship drama. Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver play theater couple going through a bitter divorce, and Dern is a joy to watch as the bulldog of a lawyer hired by Johansson's character.
12. Regina King, 'If Beale Street Could Talk' (2019)
In Barry Jenkins' follow-up to the lyrical "Moonlight," King brings serious mama-bear energy and stands out among a stellar cast (including Colman Domingo). She plays a devoted, impassioned mother to a pregnant teen daughter and the girl's wrongly imprisoned fiancé, going to extreme lengths to prove his innocence.
11. Zoe Saldaña, 'Emilia Pérez' (2025)
"Emilia" juggles a ton of different genres. Saldaña is a woman of many cinematic skills. So there's a serendipity to this movie showcasing the Marvel and "Avatar" star in a new way and letting her strut her stuff, in emotional and musical fashion, as a lawyer hired to help a Mexican drug kingpin transition to living life as a woman.
10. Allison Janney, 'I, Tonya' (2018)
There are no winners in the darkly comic Tonya Harding biopic, except when it comes to Janney as a figure-skating parent from hell. She's brilliantly caustic as the foul-mouthed, knife-throwing antagonistic mom to Margot Robbie's Tonya, going for gold with gems like 'I didn't stay home making apple brown bettys. No, I made you a champion.'
9. Octavia Spencer, 'The Help' (2012)
The 1960s-set film about Black domestic workers has not aged well and taken flak from its own stars. One good thing it did, however, was give the oh-so-talented Spencer a high-profile breakthrough role – and a crowd-pleasing one, to boot, as a housekeeper who suffers no fools and finds an unlikely friend in a social outcast (Jessica Chastain).
8. Anne Hathaway, 'Les Misérables' (2013)
Hathaway's role is small yet mighty in the big-screen adaptation of the Broadway musical. Fantine is a 19th-century single mom fired from her factory job who becomes a prostitute to support her daughter. (Did we mention she's also dying?) And when she belts the standout "I Dreamed a Dream," don't even try to hold back the waterworks.
7. Ariana DeBose, 'West Side Story' (2022)
In Steven Spielberg's revamp of an American classic, DeBose is a bold spitfire singing and dancing in "America." She also digs deep to make Anita – the same role that won Rita Moreno an Oscar in this category in 1962 – the most complex character of all, going from hopeful optimism in the first act to righteous anger and fury by the second.
6. Lupita Nyong'o, '12 Years a Slave' (2014)
Nyong'o soared in a star-making role in Steve McQueen's pre-Civil War drama, about a free Black man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) kidnapped and sold into slavery. She makes the most of the film's most intense role, as the enslaved woman who helps the newcomer yet also draws the vicious ire of a despicable plantation owner and his wife.
5. Jennifer Hudson, 'Dreamgirls' (2007)
When's the last time Beyoncé was upstaged? In the musical, she, Hudson and Anika Noni Rose play members of a 1960s Detroit girl group made stars by their manager (Jamie Foxx). Hudson's Effie is the film's talented supernova, spurned by her love, replaced as lead singer (by Beyoncé!) but bringing the house down with the movie's signature tune.
4. Da'Vine Joy Randolph, 'The Holdovers' (2024)
The holiday dramedy toes a careful line between dry humor and themes of mental health and personal loss, and no one does it better in the cast than Randolph. Playing a lunch lady at a boys boarding school, she shines in comedic moments as well as the emotional bursts of a grieving mom facing a first Christmas after her son's death.
3. Mo'Nique, 'Precious' (2010)
There are a few questionable mothers on this list but nothing like the antagonism Mo'Nique brilliantly displays in Lee Daniels' drama. Mary is so relentlessly abusive and cruel to her teen daughter Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) that we yearn for Precious to escape her clutches, and one tearful confession brings it home for an all-time Oscar performance.
2. Catherine Zeta-Jones, 'Chicago' (2003)
Zellweger may be the lead, but from the opening number, Zeta-Jones is the real showstopper of this criminally great musical. And as incarcerated diva Velma Kelly, Zeta-Jones exudes jazz age swagger and a killer amount of envy when Zellweger's arrested newcomer Roxie Hart awaits a murder trial and takes all of Velma's jailhouse attention.
1. Viola Davis, 'Fences' (2017)
Davis should have won this thing eight years earlier for her seven-minute scene/masterclass vs. Meryl Streep in "Doubt," and she certainly understands the assignment for Denzel Washington's adaptation of the 1950s-set August Wilson play. Portraying the wife of a motormouthed garbage man (Washington), Davis is the dutiful spouse until a key moment in the movie where she righteously explodes with raw, rapturous emotion, taking your breath away in the process.