20. Mark Ruffalo: You Can Count on Me (2000) – best supporting actor
Kenneth Lonergan’s bittersweet study of two orphaned siblings struggling to reconnect as emotionally damaged adults was Ruffalo’s big-screen breakthrough. His unreliable itinerant Terry habitually infuriates Laura Linney’s stoic single mother Sammy; yet Terry’s halting, heartfelt final monologue, referencing the film’s unspoken title, is an understated tear-jerker. For that speech alone, Ruffalo should’ve been nominated alongside Linney and Lonergan’s script.
19. Dolly from Leon: Triangle of Sadness (2022) – best supporting actress
As the undervalued Filipina maid who turns the tables on the spoilt, rich survivors of a shipwrecked luxury cruise, De Leon anchors Ruben Östlund’s vituperative burlesque with sly, steely charisma. The actor featured in numerous Oscars precursors, Baftas included, but found herself excluded from the industry’s biggest prize-giving in a very unfortunate, and telling, case of life imitating sledgehammer-subtle art.
18. Jake Gyllenhaal: Nightcrawler (2014) – best actor
Dan Gilroy’s tabloid satire lets Gyllenhaal loose. As bottom-feeder Louis Bloom opportunistically latches on to nocturnal crime journalism, Gyllenhaal’s sociopathic mania and corrupted self-help speak are like the car crashes he first observes, then engineers: appalling, but impossible to turn away from. Apart, that is, from the Academy, who unjustly overlooked his go-for-broke, strangely prescient embodiment of the modern media landscape.
17. Sally Hawkins: Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) – best actress
Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake apart, too many superbly detailed performances in Mike Leigh films pass the Academy by. Hawkins’ irrepressibly buoyant London schoolteacher Poppy announced her multi-faceted talents, garnering multiple honours, and even a surprise Golden Globe win. Sadly, her vibrant portrayal of sunniness concealing a much smarter self-awareness, was inexplicably left out in a weak Oscars year
16. Emily Blunt: The Devil Wears Prada (2006) – best supporting actress
Blunt’s US calling card was the plum role of “Emily”, highly-strung, hapless assistant to Meryl Streep’s icy Anna Wintour-esque fashion magazine editor in this crowd-pleasing hit. She winningly nails her character’s brow-beaten careerism and British sarcasm-as-survival-mechanism. And if nascent access to Hollywood stardom was perhaps reward enough, her appealing authenticity and crack comic timing merited recognition by the Academy, too.
15. Ethan Hawke: First Reformed (2018) – best actor
Four nominations – two for best supporting actor, two for co-writing the Before Sunset and Before Midnight screenplays – point to ample Oscars acknowledgement for Hawke. Still, recognition for his leading role as a church minister whose crisis of faith at mankind’s evil turns (self-)destructive, would’ve been well-deserved. And in the year of Rami Malek’s baffling Bohemian Rhapsody victory, his omission is tantamount to a mortal sin.
A case of splitting-your-own-vote likely kept Johansson off the ballot in her breakout year. Playing both a disaffected young bride adrift in modern Tokyo and the 17th-century inspiration for Vermeer’s treasured portrait showcased her dazzling versatility, though perhaps it confused voters. Not until 2020, when she actually achieved double nominations (for Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit), did the Oscars belatedly appreciate her undoubted talents.
13. Paul Bettany: Master and Commander (2003) – best supporting actor
Peter Weir’s rollicking seafaring adventure has become a beloved classic, though for all its gripping naval action, the film’s heart is its droll double-act of Russell Crowe’s alpha male Captain and Bettany’s shrewdly rational ship’s doctor. As confidant and foil, Bettany does wonders with unassuming decency, a man of quiet courage, essential yet easily unheeded in times of flashy showmanship.
12. Kirsten Dunst: Melancholia (2011) – best actress
There’s a strange trend of American actors (James Spader, John Turturro and others) who win Cannes acting prizes, only to be neglected by their own country’s biggest awards. Dunst might be the most egregious omission of all for her harrowing portrayal of a depressive bride who finds an eerie acceptance when faced with Earth’s annihilation in Lars von Trier’s operatic apocalypse.
11. David Oyelowo: Selma (2014) – best actor
Too often, Oscar acting nominations resemble a competition for most assiduous real-life impersonation. A shame, then, that one of the best recent examples, in Ava DuVernay’s rousing civil rights drama, went unrecognised. Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King is the noble statesman and shrewd tactician of legend, but also a flawed, sometimes faltering individual, bringing the man behind the myth to life.
Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/Studiocanal/Allstar
10. Nicole Kidman: Birth (2004) – best actress
Established Hollywood royalty, Kidman is a regular Oscar fixture with five nominations and one win. But it’s also indicative of voter preferences for capital-A acting that her nuanced role as a grieving widow grappling with her spouse’s potential spiritual reincarnation as a child, isn’t among them. The unbroken, two-minute-plus, silent close-up at the opera might be her most expressive onscreen work.
9. Lupita Nyong'o: Us (2019) – best actress
Nyong’o pulls double duty in Jordan Peele’s chilling home invasion thriller, as plucky heroine Adelaide, and her family’s subterranean, raspy-voiced, scissors-wielding, doppelganger terroriser, Red. She’s utterly convincing as both, even selling Peele’s somewhat fanciful climactic twist. The truly horrific theme here, though, is how the Academy’s perennial disdain for scary movies regularly dismisses some of the finest female performances around.
8. Hugh Grant: Paddington 2 (2017) – best supporting actor
To take best in show in a movie as practically perfect from snout to paw as Paddington 2 is some accolade. That’s the beauty of Grant’s grand larceny here, self-mockingly camping it up as vainglorious Phoenix Buchanan, struggling thespian-turned-nemesis to London’s favourite bear. Unlike Buchanan’s unwarranted craving of audience adoration, Grant’s deliciously, deliberately bad actor genuinely deserved the Academy’s spotlight.
7. Jennifer Lopez: Hustlers (2019) – best supporting actress
From the moment JLo makes her spectacular pole-dancing entrance to Fiona Apple’s Criminal, she owns the club spectators, and Lorene Scafaria’s entire movie. Yet more than her red-hot sensuality, Lopez’s soulful portrayal of Ramona, mother hen to and calculating mastermind behind Hustlers’ strippers-taking-back-control narrative, is her best role since Out of Sight. To be denied a nomination was, well, criminal.
The Coen Brothers’ small-time losers’ gallery struck its most plaintive tune in the titular beatnik folk singer, out of money, luck and time, Dylan’s musical revolution coming fast. Isaac vividly personifies Davis’s disastrous blend of artistic arrogance and deep self-loathing, while simultaneously proving his own musical chops. Perhaps inevitably, ill-fated Llewyn’s only Oscar is the man providing his poignant threnody.
Despite his A-list casts, amazingly, not one actor from a Wes Anderson film has ever been Oscar-nominated. Hence we are grouping two of the best darkly comic performances of the past two decades: Hackman’s peak-form swansong as a roguish patriarch; and Fiennes as a debonair hotel concierge, both expertly, gradually, revealing the melancholy faultlines beneath Anderson’s pristine aesthetics and deadpan dialogue.
4. Amy Adams: Arrival (2016) – best actress
The 2016 best actress race might be this century’s single-most competitive acting category. So much so that Adams’ precursor favourite shockingly failed to be nominated. Voters erred. Denis Villeneuve’s resonant tale of alien contact with Earth depends upon Adams’ grieving linguist leading audiences through a temporal spiral of loss, revelation and heartbreaking acceptance. She’d have made a worthy winner. And yet …
3. Sandra Hueller: Toni Erdmann (2016) – best actress
… the year’s greatest performance also failed, less surprisingly, to make the cut. Maren Ade’s epic tragicomedy, redefining a father-daughter relationship through his eponymous alter-ego role-play, granted Hüller a tour-de-force as her no-nonsense executive Inès unravels professionally and personally. Two scenes in particular, an enforced Whitney Houston karaoke performance, and an impromptu naked party, are as good as screen acting gets.
2. Paul Giamatti: Sideways (2004) – best actor
Alexander Payne’s sad sack romcom/oenophile odyssey was 2004’s indie hit and awards magnet. So, when five major nominations were announced, including two of its four leads, leading man Giamatti’s absence tasted … sour. Perhaps he was too convincing as dyspeptic wine snob (his Merlot-bashing line actually affected sales) and lovelorn loser Miles, to register as a genuinely great performance.
1. Naomi Watts: Mulholland Drive (2001) – best actress
Halle Berry’s 2002 win was culturally important. But, looking back, was there a single performance that year, even this century, as artistically challenging and emotionally soul-shattering as Watts’s? David Lynch’s splintered, haunted masterpiece morphs her from wide-eyed ingenue to washed-out, suicidal wreck. It’s transformative, deeply unsettling work, perhaps too reflective of Hollywood nightmarish reality for the Academy’s dreamily self-congratulatory pageant.
