With the 97th Academy Awards a month away, now is the time for me to offer up my personal nominations in the acting and directing categories before counting down my favorite movies of 2024.

As always, I have a laundry list of contenders for each of these categories and the challenge is to whittle it down to a satisfying five. The usual caveat applies: on a different day, this list might look different. But right now, this is where I’m landing.

I’ll also note that I have yet to see several films that may well shown up on these lists if I had seen them in time. Those include Nickel Boys, I’m Still Here, All We Imagine as Light, Hard Truths, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, The Room Next Door, and Queer, among others.

First up, we have Best Supporting Actor.

And the nominees are…

Yura Borisov – Anora
I was tempted to include Borisov’s cast mate, Mark Eydelshteyn, whose Vanya is a hilarious live wire masking deep insecurities. But it’s Borisov who turns Anora from a screwball sex comedy into something deeper and sadder. Every moment he’s onscreen, usually in the background, you wish he’d become a main character. It’s thrilling when he suddenly does.

Clarence Maclin – Sing Sing
Playing a version of himself — an incarcerated man who finds friendship and purpose through a prison theater program — Maclin brings a lifetime of hard lessons to his performance. It’s the ultimate form of method acting. But don’t mistake it for easy. Maclin had to go toe to toe with Colman Domingo, sell emotional moments, and master Shakespeare, all as a first time actor.

George MacKay – The Beast
MacKay had a tremendous year, also appearing in the thriller Femme and the musical The End, but his work in Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi romance The Beast impressed me the most. He plays three characters in three timelines, learning French to play an early 20th century aristocrat, adopting an American accent to play a modern day incel, and blankly embodying a man being replaced by AI in a sterile 2044.

Josh O’Connor – Challengers
O’Connor is the sharpest point in the sexy triangle at the center of Luca Guadagnino’s wildly entertaining sports drama. He plays a total asshole who you can’t help but love, a source of endless frustration for his best friend (Mike Faist) and sometime girlfriend (Zendaya). He’s a self-destructive bundle of charisma and nervous sexual energy, and O’Connor makes him the movie’s most compelling figure.

Jesse Plemons – Civil War
I like the idea of at least one supporting nomination going to somebody who drops into a movie for just a single scene and completely upends everything and everyone. That’s what Plemons does here as a chillingly sadistic soldier (for what side, we don’t know) who turns the journey of a merry band of journalists from an adventure to a nightmare. His deadpan reading of the line “What kind of American are you?” reverberated through an election year that ended up scarier than any movie.

And the winner is… Clarence Maclin. Both for his wonderful performance and the narrative behind it, I would love to see this talented man honored.