Some actors who win Oscars are cursed, drifting into obscurity after their moment in the spotlight. But other actors are cursed in a different way: despite appearing in Oscar-friendly work they somehow can’t manage to get back into the race. That’s true of Rachel Weisz, who won Best Supporting Actress for “The Constant Gardener” (2005), but hasn’t been nominated again in the 13 years since. However, it looks like this might be her “Favourite” year.
Weisz was a strong favorite throughout her “Constant Gardener” campaign, winning both the Golden Globe and the SAG Award on her way to the Oscar stage, and she has appeared in multiple Oscar-nominated films since then — “The Lovely Bones” (2009), “The Lobster” (2015) and “Youth” (2015) — in addition to other projects that seemed like they might appeal to awards voters like “The Whistleblower” (2010), “The Light Between Oceans” (2016) and “My Cousin Rachel” (2017), but none of those caught on with the academy.
She probably came closest to returning with “The Deep Blue Sea” (2012), in which she plays a woman cheating on her husband with a Royal Air Force pilot in the years after World War II. She surprised by winning the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and then she earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Film Drama Actress, but she didn’t quite get the academy’s notice.
Now she’s a strong contender to return to the Oscar lineup at last thanks to “The Favourite,” in which she plays the conniving Sarah Churchill, who is the real power behind the throne in Queen Anne‘s court. After some early awards confusion as to whether Weisz and her female co-stars would compete as lead or supporting actors, Fox Searchlight announced it was pushing Olivia Colman in the Best Actress race with Weisz and Emma Stone fighting to be the favorite in the Best Supporting Actress contest.
But why choose? It looks like they’ll both be nominated based on our current forecasts. According to the combined predictions of thousands of Gold Derby users, Stone ranks third in the race with 5/1 odds, while Weisz is fourth with 11/2 odds. We’ve polled 29 Expert journalists from top media outlets for their Best Supporting Actress picks as of this writing, and 24 of them are betting on Weisz to finally earn her second nomination. Could she even win again?
Be sure to check out how our experts rank this year’s Oscar contenders. Then take a look at the most up-to-date combined odds before you make your own Oscar predictions. Don’t be afraid to jump in now since you can keep changing your predictions until just before nominations are announced on January 22.
