Oscars 2024 Tips: Five favourites for Best Actor award at this year's Academy Awards including Barry Keoghan

With the 2024 Oscars drawing closer, we look at which actors we think we be in the running to win Best Actor at the 96th Academy Awards.

Who will lift the award for Best Actor at the 2024 Oscars? Cr. Getty Images

Cillian Murphy - Oppenheimer

He is the big favourite for the awards - and understandably so. The first of two Irishmen in our list, Murphy executes his role as 'Father of the Atomic Bomb' Robert J. Oppenheimer with cinematic excellence, as we are taken on a three hour journey that encapsulates his romantic struggles, personal dilemmas and an invention that changed the world.

Paul Giamatti - The Holdovers

Already a big winner at the Golden Globes, Giamatti's performance as grumpy boarding school teacher Paul Hunham is a triumph for old school heart-warming classic comedies that are very much in short supply these days. Forced to remain on campus to babysit students who have nowhere to go at Christmas, the journey from audiences are taken on as he makes an unlikely but unbreakable bond with the brainy but troubled student Angus Tully is a real treat.

Barry Keoghan - Saltburn

Far from the favourite for the award, we still feel Keoghan may nab a nomination for his performance as the unforgettable Oliver in the polarising Saltburn. The Irishman has long been seen as Hollywood's next big thing and in this explosive role he excels as an Oxford student who becomes obsessed with the enigmatic and excruciatingly rich Felix and his family after being invited to their estate.

Bradley Cooper - Maestro

While the film itself wasn't a huge cinematic hit due to its limited release, it is certainly one of Cooper's most outstanding performances as he takes on the role of Leonard Bernstein in this biopic about the conductor and composer and his relationship with his wife Felicia Montealegre. A complex and intriguing figure, Cooper holds the audience's attention throughout and fully deserves a shot at the award - which he might just win.

Jeffrey Wright - American Fiction

The Washington DC-born actor is currently 20/1 to win the award but is strongly expected to be handed a nomination after starring as 'Monk' Ellison in Cord Jefferson's hilarious directorial debut. Wright has long been underrated in tinsel town but should 100 per cent be in with a chance of an Oscar nomination this year after his superb role as a novelist who confronts our culture's obsession with reducing people to outlandish stereotypes.