Jessie Buckley and Timothée Chalamet might be winning all of the awards but as Oscar voting begins, these actors also deserve inclusion
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very January, if not earlier, awards narratives leading up to the Oscars take shape. While the specifics of the Academy Award nominations are never known in advance, and can always be counted on for some surprises when they’re actually unveiled, critics and pundits and fans all enter into that final stretch with a pretty good idea of who won’t be nominated.
Some of this is because of the endless spitballing. But the “won’t” list is also easy to compile because it ultimately houses almost everyone who acted in a movie over the past year. Twenty performances are selected for the Oscars annually, and given the other high-profile awards bodies with additional preferences, category numbers and a never-complete overlap with the Academy, let’s say about 40 are in the broader competition of real possibilities. But there are so many more great performances every year than that, across all sizes, scopes and genres.
They’re not all in equally great movies, and they don’t all fit into the Academy’s collective imagination of what constitutes the best work of any given year. Even as that organization has grown a bit more adventurous, there will always be individual performances that simply didn’t have much of a chance for any number of reasons: release date, box office, critical support, genre biases and so on. But it doesn’t have to be that way! It’s possible to buck the status quo, whether it’s as an awards voter looking beyond the most-hyped contenders, or simply as a viewer looking for something interesting to watch on a Friday night. So read this rundown of the year’s overlooked-by-awards performances, then, as suggestions for last-minute consideration from Academy members – or, more likely, recommendations from looking at great acting from some different angles before settling in for the usual annual horserace.
