Soon enough, a new year of Oscar winners will be announced, including for Best Supporting Actress. Ariana DeBose remains in the driver’s seat for her turn as Anita in the West Side Story remake, but Kirsten Dunst (The Power of the Dog) or Aunjanue Ellis (King Richard) could pull off a surprise as well. In any event, whoever wins will become part of a long history, a history of the Oscars and of Hollywood itself. And so, it’s worth looking back over the past ten years and seeing how the category has (or hasn’t) evolved.

Compared to Best Supporting Actor, which has awarded performances in roles like “kindly drug dealer” and “abusive jazz tyrant”, Best Supporting Actress has mostly gone to wives and mothers (or grandmothers) over the past ten years. Perhaps it illustrates a discrepancy between opportunities for men and opportunities for women, or perhaps it’s just the result of campaigning clear lead actresses in the Supporting category. Either way, there are some true gems among these ten, so let’s take a look.

RELATED: Oscar-Winning Supporting Actor Performances, Ranked

10. Laura Dern - Marriage Story (2019)

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Image Via Netflix

It should be noted that none of the performances on this list are “bad.” Laura Dern has been one of the most consistent actresses in the world for thirty years, and she brings color and charm to Nora Fanshaw, the pugnacious divorce lawyer hired by Nicole Barber (Scarlett Johansson) in Marriage Story. Dern makes Nora a breezy, likable confidant to Nicole during her painful divorce, but she also hints at the calculating mind behind that persona: every casual gesture or impassioned speech is made with a goal in mind. Still, this is the kind of role Dern can play in her sleep, and with so many strong supporting performances that year (Jennifer Lopez, Florence Pugh, Zhao Shu-zhen) it wasn’t the time for a career achievement award. Besides, just before the Oscars, Dern received the greatest achievement an actress can get: being serenaded by the Gay Men’s Choir of Los Angeles.

9. Anne Hathaway - Les Misérables (2012)

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Image Via Universal Pictures

The phrase “Oscar bait” gets thrown around carelessly these days, but there are times when no other phrase will do. Anne Hathaway’s performance as Fantine in Les Misérables was the biggest, broadest swing for the Oscars fences in the past ten years. She played one of the most important characters in a beloved musical, a tragic prostitute dying of tuberculosis. She went method, eating less than 500 calories a day and staying away from her husband to get in the right mindset. Because of Tom Hooper’s decision to have the actors sing live, she performed Fantine’s signature song, “I Dreamed a Dream,” in a one-take close-up, sobbing and wailing with a throat full of phlegm. The result is undeniably effective: Hathaway is an excellent actress, and it’s impossible to look away from her even before the camera locks in on her face. But showy, self-destructive performances shouldn’t be encouraged to the extent that they are, and the teeth-gnashing melodrama doesn’t linger as it ought to. The fact that one can draw a straight line from here to Cats doesn’t help.

8. Alicia Vikander - The Danish Girl (2015)

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Image Via Focus Features

Alicia Vikander would have been an inspired choice for Best Supporting Actress - if she were nominated for Ex Machina. There, her performance as manipulative robot Ava was the enigmatic heart of the film, a paranoid techno-thriller that won Best Visual Effects that year. Instead, Vikander won for her performance in The Danish Girl, a pretty but brainless period drama only remembered for the controversy around casting Eddie Redmayne as a trans woman. As Gerda Wegener, the wife of fellow artist Lili Elbe (Redmayne), Vikander elevates weak material: To the extent that The Danish Girl works, it works because Vikander evinces such tenderness for her wife, even as she’s frustrated by some of Lili’s decisions. But it was the safest of safe choices, especially considering they could have awarded her for a far superior performance were it not for their bias against genre films.

7. Allison Janney - I, Tonya (2017)

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I, Tonya succeeded as a sympathetic portrait of the disgraced figure skater because it illustrated how hard it would be for anyone to succeed in her position. Tonya Harding was a brash, working-class girl from the Pacific Northwest whose astonishing skating talent was held back by various forces: Her own stubbornness, sure, but also the snooty figure skating establishment, her lunkheaded abusive husband (Sebastian Stan), and especially her loathsome mother, LaVona. Allison Janney was tasked with making the domineering skate mom so hateful that no daughter of hers could become a well-adjusted adult. Janney certainly succeeds on that front; she delivers abusive barbs with just the right mix of casual cruelty and genuine venom, and there’s an insult-comic sensibility that makes her hard to look away from. The only drawback to Janney’s victory is that Laurie Metcalf didn’t win for her superb performance in Lady Bird.

6. Regina King - If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

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Image Via Mirror Releasing

Barry Jenkins followed up his instant-classic Moonlight with a romantic, heartbreaking adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk. It didn’t repeat Moonlight’s Cinderella run for Best Picture (although it should have been at least nominated), but it did provide an opportunity to recognize one of the industry’s most reliable actresses. Regina King already had two Emmys under her belt for American Crime and Seven Seconds; it was only a matter of time before the Academy came knocking. As Sharon Rivers, the mother of a Black woman whose boyfriend has been wrongfully convicted of rape, King is a font of maternal warmth. When her daughter, Clem (KiKi Payne), reveals that she’s pregnant by her lover, Fonny (Stephan James), she’s not angry or even particularly surprised. When Clem breaks the news to Fonny’s sanctimonious mother (Aunjanue Ellis), she’s there to keep the peace. And when she has to fly to Puerto Rico as a last-ditch effort to free Fonny, she’s willing to do it for her daughter. A less careful actress might have flattened Sharon into a martyr, but King is too grounded and charismatic a presence; she’s not a saint, she’s simply a good woman.

5. Viola Davis - Fences (2016)

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Image Via Paramount Pictures

When Viola Davis earned her first Oscar nomination in 2008 for her performance in Doubt, a win was inevitable - if not that year, then eventually. She had ten minutes of screen time, and in those ten minutes, she established herself as an actress of Biblical power and raw pathos, capable of going toe to toe with Meryl Streep. Put simply, there was no limit to her potential. When Davis finally won eight years later, it was for her role in Fences, the film adaptation of the August Wilson play. Adapted from the Broadway revival that already won Davis and Denzel Washington Tonys, Fences is stage-y to a fault. But whenever ex-baseball player Troy Maxson (Washington) does battle with his wife Rose (Davis), that staginess works to its advantage. When Viola Davis takes command of the screen, asserting her will as Rose against her hard-headed husband, it feels like watching a living legend in an intimate theater.

4. Octavia Spencer - The Help (2011)

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Image Via Disney

Since audiences have become more aware of white savior narratives, no matter how well-intentioned, The Help has not aged particularly well. Still, it’s impossible to deny the strength of its performances, from Viola Davis’ portrait of dignity to a never-better Bryce Dallas Howard as the hateful villain. Despite the established names, perhaps the best performance (and the eventual Oscar winner) came from an actress who had spent the previous decade popping up in shows like Ugly Betty and The Big Bang Theory. Octavia Spencer is, of course, part of the film’s signature scene, where Minny Jackson tells her former boss, Hilly (Howard), just what she put in that chocolate pie. While that scene shows off her wily charm and ace comic timing, Spencer is more than just a one-scene wonder: She gives a sensitive, funny, poignant performance throughout the whole film, going through the wringer and ending up with a new job and good friends.

3. Patricia Arquette - Boyhood (2014)

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Image Via IFC Films

When Boyhood was first released, it was greeted with the rapturous acclaim of an instant classic, with some suggesting it could sweep the Oscars. It still remains beloved, but after the requisite backlash led to arguments over whether the twelve-year filming was a gimmick or not, Boyhood only walked away with one trophy: Patricia Arquette’s. There is nothing gimmicky about Arquette’s performance as Olivia Evans: she makes her character compelling from beginning to end, harried and loving and frightened and exhausted. A lot of stuff happens to Olivia over twelve years - a divorce, an education, an abusive relationship, another divorce - but Arquette keeps things understated, never indulging in melodrama. Even her breakdown at the end, when Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) heads off to college, is restrained: she buries her head in her arms, sobs for a moment, then gives a brief monologue and sees him off. Like Boyhood as a whole, Arquette’s performance is a lot of little moments that form something greater.

2. Youn Yuh-jung - Minari (2020)

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Image Via A24

As Meryl Streep is to America, as Isabelle Huppert is to France, so is Youn Yuh-jung to South Korea. A towering figure in Korean cinema, Youn has starred in everything from psychological dramas to erotic thrillers, playing nuanced, complicated characters that refuse to be pigeonholed. It might say something about the Academy’s attitude towards foreign films that she was only recognized once she played a sweet old grandma. But Soon-ja, the emotional heart of Minari, never feels like a cliché, or even a too-blunt subversion of a cliché. She’s a playful, tender grandmother to David and Anne (Alan Kim and Noel Kate Cho); she’s a dirty-mouthed firecracker with a fondness for gambling; she’s a savvy, clever farmer. Youn’s ability to embody many sides of one person make Soon-ja a treat to watch; it’s also why it’s so tragic when Soon-ja suffers a debilitating stroke, as Youn had brought her to live so vividly.

1. Lupita Nyong’o - 12 Years a Slave (2013)

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Image Via Fox Searchlight Pictures

When Lupita Nyong’o won Best Supporting Actress for her role as Patsy in 12 Years a Slave, it was the ultimate feel-good narrative, the culmination of a meteoric star-is-born rise that only happens once every ten or twenty years. In this case, however, it came about because of a movie that was the precise opposite of “feel-good.” 12 Years a Slave is a beautiful, immaculately crafted film about the hideous depravity of the slave trade. While the audience’s heart aches for every anguished, terrified slave in this film, the plight of Patsey is uniquely horrifying.

The prized slave of the sadistic Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), Patsey suffers his rape and violence, as well as the jealousy of his wife (Sarah Paulson). There is no light in her life: a brief pleasant moment is interrupted by Mrs. Epps hurling a crystal glass at her face. She pleads for the protagonist, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), to drown her, as she can’t bring herself to do it. It would be tremendously upsetting to watch anyone suffer in that way, but Nyong’o’s performance makes it physically painful. Every sob lands like a punch, and every scream feels like a cattle prod to the ribs. Worst of all, enough of Nyong’o’s natural intelligence and poise shines through that one can’t help but wonder what kind of person Patsey might have been if her freedom wasn’t so cruelly stolen. What would she do? How would she live? What would she make of herself? It's because of Nyong'o's gutwrenching performance that these questions linger in our minds long after the film ends.