What to know about supporting actress nominees

LOS ANGELES >> Everyone but Angela Bassett is a first-time Oscar nominee, and even she is a firsttimer in this category. But while Bassett seemingly has this locked up, there is a stunning breadth of experience among the supporting actress nominees, showing that breakout moments aren’t exclusively the territory of the very young.

All will be celebrated during Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony, which airs live on ABC beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern. And there’s still time to catch up on their performances before the show.

Here’s a bit more about this year’s contenders.

Angela Bassett

It’s been 29 years since Angela Bassett’s last Oscar nomination, for playing Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” and though her nomination for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” was widely expected, it still had a profound effect on her.

“I’m literally sitting here holding my head, and holding my heart,” she told the AP nomination morning. “I’m excited, I’m grateful, I’m nervous. I’m going to have to start journaling.”

Her character, Queen Ramonda, she said, “is reflective of what mothers have been doing forever, and also a representation of what Black mothers have been doing — holding families together. Holding memories, holding wisdom... That’s what she is attempting to do in spite of the trauma she has experienced herself.”

And her late co-star Chadwick Boseman has never left her mind.

Hong Chau

In Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale,” Hong Chau plays best friend and nurse to Brendan Fraser’s obese shut-in professor, his most regular visitor and assertive caregiver. She desperately, unsentimentally prods him to get healthier, to care about himself.

“I guess I just start dreaming up a character,” Chau told the AP about her process. “I start to see flashes of something in my head as I’m reading a script in terms of their appearance, the cadence of their speech.”

On “The Whale,” she asked for her character to have tattoos.

“You don’t really see them in the movie at all,” Chau said. “But every morning I would sit and get tattoos on both arms and the back of my neck. I don’t think another production would do that.”

Kerry Condon

Kerry Condon’s Siobhán occupies an important space in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” as a kind of voice of reason between the warring ex-friends Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson). And somewhere in the mess she gets to have her own realization about how she wants to spend the rest of her days — and it’s not with the “fecking boring” men of Inisherin.

Stephanie Hsu

Stephanie Hsu was a Broadway veteran with a few TV credits when she worked with the writing and directing duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for an episode of “Nora From Queens.” After that experience, she said, she followed them to Los Angeles and soon after they told her about their idea for “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” in which she gets to play Michelle Yeoh’s daughter and the villainous Jobu.

Jamie Lee Curtis

Jamie Lee Curtis had all but resigned herself to the idea that she was not going to be nominated for an Oscar in her career. She was so shocked to hear her name that she didn’t even notice her friend had taken a picture of the moment that she’d later post on Instagram, writing “THIS IS WHAT SURPRISE LOOKS LIKE.”

But the self-proclaimed Nepo baby broke through in the same category her mother Janet Leigh was nominated in (for “Psycho”). One of the best parts of the experience, Curtis told the AP, was that in the short time since the nominations she’s become friends with her fellow nominees.

“Five strangers have become friends,” she said. “That’s the surprising and beautiful part of this that I’ve made friends through a competition.”