The Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winner Favorite Just Flipped

The Best Supporting Actress race for the Oscars appeared to have a frontrunner emerging, but now there may just be a new favorite. Amy Madigan made headlines early in awards season by racking up wins with critics, including a Critics’ Choice Awards win, for her performance in Weapons. At the same time, One Battle After Another‘s Teyana Taylor remained at the forefront of the race for most.

Once she won at the Golden Globes, delivered a great speech, and then watched One Battle After Another receive 13 Oscar nominations overall, her place as the predicted Best Supporting Actress winner felt safe. The only thing that would change that would be losing additional precursor awards, like BAFTA and SAG (now formally known as the Actor Awards), especially if Madigan were the recipient of the trophies.

The BAFTA winners are now known, and, surprisingly, Taylor wasn’t the winner in Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Neither was Madigan, as she wasn’t a nominee. Instead, Sinners‘ Wunmi Mosaku won at BAFTA, which might just make her the favorite to win the Oscar.

Wunmi Mosaku’s BAFTA Win Is Huge For The Oscars

As one of the pleasant surprises of the 2026 Oscar nominations, Mosaku has now secured her first major win of awards season through the BAFTA recognition. In doing so, the British group went with a different winner than the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards.

Why is that so notable? BAFTA, CCA, and Golden Globes have only given their Best Supporting Actress categories to three separate performances eight times previously. And when that happens, it is the BAFTA winner who stands the best chance of also winning at the Oscars, historically speaking.

The last time this happened was in 2020, when Jodie Foster (The Mauritanian) won GG, Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) won CCA, and Youn Yuh-jung (Minari) won BAFTA. It was Youn who then went on to win the Oscar after also winning at SAG.

Youn was the fifth BAFTA winner in a GG-CCA-BAFTA split year to finish the award season as the Oscar winner, too. The others are Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, 2007), Cate Blanchett (The Aviator, 2004), Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love, 1998), and Juliette Binoche (The English Patient, 1996).

That correlation is huge for Mosaku. If she was only going to win one of these awards (she wasn’t nominated for the Golden Globes), BAFTA was the one to get based on the data. She’s now looking to be the sixth such winner out of nine instances, with Mosaku’s position strengthened by being attached to Sinners‘ record-breaking nomination count.

This puts all eyes on the upcoming Actor Awards ceremony to determine whether Mosaku will be the actress ultimately crowned by the Academy in the Best Supporting Actress category.

When these splits happened before, two of the five BAFTA winners (Blanchett and Youn) also won at SAG before winning the Oscar. The other instances saw SAG match with GG and CCA once each, while 2007 saw Ruby Dee win at SAG after not winning at GG, CCA, or BAFTA.

When the Actor Awards happen on Sunday, if Mosaku wins the Best Supporting Actress category, her placement as the Oscars favorite will be locked in. And even if she loses, she still may deserve that status, especially if non-Academy nominees Odessa A’zio or Ariana Grande become surprise winners.