The Golden Globes have come and gone, the Bafta and Guild nominee lists are out, and the Oscar race appears to be taking clear shape in advance of the nomination announcement on 23 January. Happily, it remains a more lively and contested one than usual in the acting races: in no category has a single name hogged the critics’ and precursor awards in the manner of a Helen Mirren for The Queen or a Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood.
Yet as fluid as the competition remains, any number of worthy names have already been frozen out of the race – victims of diminishing buzz, undernourished campaigns or films that were simply never in voters’ wheelhouses, or even on their radars, in the first place. Here are 10 under-rewarded performances that deserve at least as much chatter as Gary Oldman and Frances McDormand.
Claes Bang in The Square
A long-serving TV and stage actor in his native Denmark, Claes Bang is suddenly, at age 50, poised for international stardom – suave and magnetic enough to prompt “next James Bond” rumours among the more suggestible. Whatever the future holds, it probably won’t bring many roles as multifaceted as the lead in Ruben Ostlund’s Palme d’Or-winning art-scene satire The Square: as a hotshot museum curator undone personally and professionally by a PR catastrophe, Bang stitches a nimble flair for farce to an inside-out study of male crisis. His elegant tragicomic turn should be leading this year’s best actor race, but the film hasn’t managed to break out of the foreign-language holding pen. For now, Bang must settle for having the new best name in showbiz.
Kirsten Dunst in The Beguiled
Six years ago, Dunst was the toast of Cannes – winning best actress for fraught, gutsy work in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia – only to see the US awards parade pass her by months later. Something similar is happening this year: on the Croisette, Dunst earned best-in-show reviews for her beautifully modulated, sensually awoken work as yearning, buttoned-up schoolmarm Edwina Morrow in Sofia Coppola’s pastels-and-blood reimagination of the civil war revenge parable previously filmed by Don Siegel. More than anyone in the fine ensemble, she gave Coppola’s stylish vision a bruised, fluttering heart beneath its gorgeous ruffles and corsets, yet months later, the actress has received not so much as a passing mention from any awards body.
Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant
This year’s best film-saving performance by a supporting actor in a Ridley Scott blockbuster? No, not Christopher Plummer’s merely serviceable substitute turn as J Paul Getty in All the Money in the World, whatever Bafta and the Golden Globes would have us believe. Rather, it was Fassbender’s delicious twin turn as synthetic androids David and Walter – the former’s uncanny humanity already familiar from Prometheus, the latter a whole new lurid surprise – that gave the latest, unabashedly trashy but surprisingly likable Alien retread its eerie, nasty pulse. Generally a stern presence on screen, Fassbender has never leaned this playfully into richly cured ham: voters won’t stoop to such genre antics, but he deserves the nomination for his gleeful “don’t let the bedbugs bite” line reading alone.
Sally Hawkins in Maudie
OK, so Sally Hawkins hasn’t been overlooked this season: the eternally endearing British actress is all but guaranteed the second Oscar nomination of her career for her affecting silent turn in best picture-fancied fantasy The Shape of Water. But it’s not her best work of the year. In Aisling Walsh’s little-seen, beautifully formed biopic of juvenile arthritis-stricken Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis, Hawkins astonishingly meshes her signature emotional vulnerability with intricate, even transformative physical technique – the kind of all-rounder tour de force that would rake in honours if showcased in a more visible film. The National Society of Film Critics awarded her best actress for both performances, but that joint citation is likely to be all she wrote for Maudie this year.
Sylvia Hoeks in Blade Runner 2049
Denis Villeneuve’s eye-ravishing sequel to the 1982 sci-fi touchstone has thus far received the awards attention it merits for its wondrous cinematography, soundscape and design properties, while Villeneuve himself scored a surprise Bafta nod – though its human components have gone unrecognised. But Dutch up-and-comer Hoeks deserves notice: as terrifyingly driven replicant enforcer Luv, she effectively fills the narrative space so memorably occupied in the original by her compatriot Rutger Hauer, but with a kinky, off-kilter, uncanny-valley energy that’s entirely her own. It’s too strange and ice-edged a performance to overcome the Academy’s general bias against sci-fi performers, but one hopes Hoeks’s reward from Hollywood isn’t just a surfeit of similar-but-lesser fembot-villain roles: she’s one of the year’s most intriguing revelations.
O’Shea Jackson Jr in Ingrid Goes West
Matt Spicer’s wicked Instagram-age black comedy has received a scattering of breakthrough mentions for the film-maker himself, but none for its terrific ensemble: I was tempted to list Elizabeth Olsen’s devastatingly pointed sendup of hipster wellness goddesses or Aubrey Plaza’s gangly millennial spin on Tom Ripley. But it’s Jackson Jr, the livewire son of Ice Cube, who lands the film’s broadest laughs and most poignant grabs for the heart as a dimly Batman-obsessed screenwriter trying to make whatever human connection he can in LA’s nightmare purgatory of industry wannabes. Jackson Jr already made an auspicious debut playing his own dad in Straight Outta Compton; this follow-up proves he can hold the camera’s gaze without the benefit of canny stunt casting.
Melissa Leo in Novitiate
If you’d heard the buzz a year ago, in the snowy heights of Sundance, for first-time director Maggie Betts’s subtle, solemn, morally torn convent drama, you’d have bet money that Melissa Leo would now be contending for her second best supporting actress Oscar. As an unhinged, outmoded, abusive mother superior raging against Catholic church reform, she was one of 2017’s most vivid villains: a conflicted tangle of sadism and spiritual devotion, played with emotional candour and just a hint of camp relish. Yet despite the prestige muscle of distributor Sony Classics, all awards talk for the film seemed to dissipate after it quietly opened in October. Leo won her 2010 Oscar for The Fighter after paying for her own, now-infamous “Consider” campaign ads; one wishes she’d taken matters into her own hands again this year.
Nahuel Pérez Biscayart in BPM (Beats Per Minute)
Robin Campillo’s rich, sprawling, Cannes-storming reflection on the Act-Up Aids activism movement was looking a solid bet for a foreign language Oscar nomination before its shock omission from the pre-nomination shortlist. If the film fell at that hurdle, don’t hold your breath for awards attention in any other categories, least of all the best actor nod it deserves for the Argentinian Pérez Biscayart, a fevered ball of rhetorical fury, erotic energy and proudly queer charisma as the group’s thorniest, most volatile member. Campillo’s film is a generously weighted ensemble piece, but as his character’s own battle with Aids becomes its narrative crux, Pérez Biscayart shoulders its emotional burden with aching tenderness and worn body language.
Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman
Throughout this season, Oscar pundits have listed Vega, the riveting transgender star of Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s beguiling character study, as a notable outlier in the best actress race – though for all the compelling “Could Daniela Vega Be The First Transgender Oscar Nominee?” headlines, not one critics’ group or awards body has yet taken the (click)bait. That’s a shame: Vega deserves notice not simply for the sake of precedent or posterity, but because her vibrant, full-hearted turn as a waitress and singer battling the prejudice of her lover’s transphobic family after his sudden death is as emotionally acute and screen-filling as any of the household names in the best actress race.
Taliah Lennice Webster in Good Time
She scored a surprise Independent Spirit Award nomination at the outset of the awards season, but nothing has followed since for tack-sharp discovery Webster – or, indeed, for anyone involved with the Safdie brothers’ swaggering, justly acclaimed but sadly under-seen heist thriller. In perhaps the year’s most auspiciously self-possessed debut, the 19-year-old newcomer smashes into the frenzied proceedings midway through, without missing one of the film’s quick, hard beats: as an accidental teenage accomplice to Robert Pattinson’s chaos-causing bank robber, she coolly wrests entire scenes from her co-star, himself in the form of his life. Webster’s IMDb page lists no upcoming features; one can only hope casting directors catch up with the film and rush for her number.
