Another year, another class of actors who got close to Oscar glory but failed to make the cut. Like last year, here are capsules of 15 unnominated but buzzy performances. At the end of the article, you'll get to vote for who you think should get the full "Almost There" treatment. Since I already wrote extensively about Ruth Negga in Passing and Simon Rex in Red Rocket, those two won't be here, though my heart mourns for their dashed Oscar dreams.
First up, let's start with the season's wildest race...
BEST ACTRESS has been a punditry rollercoaster, with presumptive locks dropping in and out of favor for the past few months. Here, at TFE, we love a messy competition, especially when the final results are this delightfully surprising. In the end, the only person who got recognized by all major precursors was left out of the Oscar ballot…
Lady Gaga in HOUSE OF GUCCI
You have to respect the actress's commitment to her role, even if the results lean towards unmodulated chaos. Gaga delivers a maximalist performance here, full of bold choices and erratic stylization. It's an exuberant approach to biopic acting that reminds one of Old Hollywood actorly excess. In many ways, this take on Patrizia Reggiani is reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor's early nominated turns. There's an undeniable intensity mixed with blinding star power that, nonetheless, begs for steadier guidance. Rather than blame the singer turned actress for this performance's shoddier moments, I'd instead point my finger at Ridley Scott. Throughout House of Gucci, he seems utterly uninterested in helping his cast reach a cohesive register, whether within their individual characterizations or collective ensemble work. Also, yes, she sounded more Russian than Italian.
Jennifer Hudson in RESPECT
I confess myself a Hudson agnostic, even though I've admired her work sporadically through the last two decades. She's always a striking presence and sometimes nails a scene so hard the screen seems on the verge of spontaneously combusting. Respect is a mixed bag of fine moments and murkier passages, coming alive during musical performances and then dozing off into semi-catatonia as it goes through the standard biopic motions. Hudson's performance as Aretha Franklin is the same, oscillating between perfunctory strategies and sudden blasts of charisma. That being said, in a contemporary context where mimicry is increasingly at the forefront of what is considered good acting, one must admire Jennifer Hudson's avoidance of cheap impersonation. It never feels as if she's trying to duplicate Franklin. Rather, the actress approaches her as a movie character in her own right.
Alana Haim in LICORICE PIZZA
Some people are just natural-born screen sirens. Such is the case of Alana Haim, who lazily wanders into Licorice Pizza and delivers an effortless star turn of uncommon confidence and unapologetic prickliness. Stepping into a role that was written specifically for her, Haim delineates a contradicting young woman who's both disappointed by her own choices and knowingly running in the general direction of self-sabotaging failure. The discourse around the movie's age-gap romance misses how the central character dynamic is questioned throughout Licorice Pizza, often manifesting in miasmas of guilt and personal disappointment that Haim so beautifully embodies. Still, her portrait of arrested development isn't without its faults, and the performer's inexperience sometimes rears its ugly head. All in all, a splendid, if unperfect, debut.
Rachel Zegler in WEST SIDE STORY
Speaking of debuts, Rachel Zegler got herself a dazzling first time on-screen too. Statistically, she even seemed poised for a locked nomination, having now become the only Best Actress contender to win both NBR and a Globe to get then ignored by AMPAS. As lovely as she is, I can't say I'm mourning her absence. Zegler brings adolescent carnality to Maria, repudiating notions that the character is a passive maiden with no agency or inner desires. However, as the tragedy unfolds, her turn becomes increasingly unsteady, culminating in a finale that's the picture's Achilles' heel. Yet, her voice is divine, and she manages to make an oft dull role into the movie's captivating center.
While Best Actress seemed to be in constant flux throughout the season, BEST ACTOR was another story altogether. It didn't take long before four locks solidified, leaving a highly contested fifth spot eventually won by Javier Bardem. Some of the guys who were vying for the nod include:
Leonardo DiCaprio in DON'T LOOK UP
Adam McKay's latest might be the most brazen display of actorly tics I've ever seen. Amid the all-star cast, Leonardo DiCaprio is the most mannered performer on-screen, though there's a clear purpose to his choices. In short, the actor plays a study on frustration, impotence as the nervous inability to accomplish anything even as apocalyptic doom is upon us. It's not an especially deep portrayal, and, at the end of the day, no choice surprises or defies the audience's first impressions. However, it gets the job done, even though the strain of that big Howard Beale moment is a tad too obvious and inorganic.
Peter Dinklage in CYRANO
We should appreciate how hard it is to make screen love feel palpable, immediate, real. It's something often taken for granted, especially when it comes to male actors. In other words, what Peter Dinklage does in Cyrano, regardless of musical prowess, is remarkable and deserves its flowers. Joe Wright seems keenly aware of his leading man's best assets, often staging scenes around Dinklage's face, the powerful expressivity of his gaze, the lacerating sentiment he can invoke in close-up. Look no further than the musical's reinterpretation of the balcony scene. Dinklage's rendition of "Overcome" is a plaintive marvel, full of yearning in the voice and devastation in the eyes.
Mahershala Ali in SWAN SONG
At first, it seemed like nobody was watching or talking about the second Swan Song of 2021. And then, both the HFPA and BAFTA-nominated Ali in their Best Actor lineups, making the two-time Oscar winner appear like a viable candidate in the race. What's more, he wouldn't have been a bad nominee, though it's rare for sci-fi fare to get acting accolades. Playing a dying man who secretly clones himself so his family won't have to deal with loss, Ali grounds the convoluted plot in painful human reality. Seeing him act off his duplicated self is a spectacle, a formidable actor trying to resolve how to embody an impossibility. However, it's the scenes Ali shares with Naomie Harris that really make the film work and reduce the spectator to a blubbering mess.
Hidetoshi Nishijima in DRIVE MY CAR
Considering Drive My Car's overall popularity with AMPAS, it feels like Hidetoshi Nishijima was closer to an Oscar nomination than some of the more famous contenders. As Kafuku, the Japanese thespian delivers a study on acting as a collaborative art form and as conduit for processing the complications of grief. It's a tour de force in the form of a patient slow-burn, gradually revealing newer depths until a devastating snowbound climax opens the floodgates, setting loose a naked vulnerability that electrifies the film, brings the audience to its knees. Not only that, but Nishijima also nails the theatrical acting contextualized within screen acting. His Uncle Vanya, though only briefly glimpsed, is a heartfelt achievement all in itself.
The snub of the year is Ruth Negga. As far as I'm concerned, that's an absolute truth, even though Gaga's absence was more statistically unprecedented. But of course, as far as precursors are concerned, other people were contending for the unstable BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS slots that ended up going to Buckley and Dench. They were:
Caitríona Balfe in BELFAST
Going into Belfast, my hopes for Balfe were sky-high. After admiring her work on TV and limited film roles, the prospect of a big-screen showcase was appetizing, to say the least. Unfortunately, such expectations were too great, and Branagh's latest ended up disappointing, both as overall cinema and as a performance piece. While the Irish actress has some stellar moments, they never cohere into a solidified vision of Ma. For example, there's little to no consideration to how the figure might be differently perceived in scenes alone with her husband or moments seen exclusively through a child's POV. In the end, her work consists of a series of Oscar clips in search of a characterization. The same thing happens with Jamie Dornan, another Celtic thespian with the potential to be a star, the charisma and beauty too. Both actors are let down by their movie, but they also let Belfast down. In smaller roles, Hinds and Dench managed to provide the project a lived-in quality their younger colleagues never quite grasp.
Ann Dowd in MASS
Grief and loss are popular themes among this season's awards hopefuls. Joining Ali, Nishijima, and the undiscussed Nicolas Cage in Pig, Ann Dowd offers a searing vision of motherly bereavement complicated by the monstrous actions of one's child. The ensemble nature of Mass combined with its limited scope means the actors' work is even more collaborative than usual. Furthermore, each of the leading quartet must convey years of complex shared history through suggestion alone, articulating the visceral reality of a bone-breaking blow when all that's left of it is an everlasting bruise. Even as I love the performance, I can't help but think she was the least deserving of the Mass cast. Though, when the level of talent is that sky-high, saying someone's the weakest link doesn't mean much. All that excellence and no cast nomination? How come, SAG?
Cate Blanchett in NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Of course, the Screen Actors Guild saw fit to nominate Cate Blanchett, whose take on a scheming analyst is the highlight of Guillermo del Toro's latest Best Picture nominee. While Blanchett's portrayal of Dr. Lilith Ritter doesn't hold a candle to Helen Walker's version in the 1947 original, there's plenty to love. Instead of going for thorny psychology, the Australian star chooses the path of deadly glamour and hyper-stylized hunger. Hers is a refraction of femme fatale archetypes seen through a prism of digital revisionism, an interplay of depthless surfaces whose very raison d'être is their unidimensional venom. As someone who prefers Blanchett at her most mannered, the theatricality of this turn tastes like the sweetest ambrosia.
Finally, we arrive at the year's most underwhelming and inconsistent race. The final Oscar lineup for BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR is quite solid, but the trio there was full of surprising omissions and dispassionate inclusions, some horrid possibilities, and ultimately ignored standouts:
Jared Leto in HOUSE OF GUCCI
I've seldom felt more respect for the Academy's voting body than when they revealed a reluctance to award Jared Leto's cartoonish take on Paolo Gucci. For months, a nomination seemed inevitable, but a sense of reason and good taste prevailed at the last moment. While I get why some love the chaos Leto brings to his movie, not even House of Gucci's general mediocrity could convince me that he's any good. Disruptive, sure, but that doesn't make it a functional piece of acting. Instead, we have a collection of crude sketches and insulting reductivism, an intersection of opera buffa and SNL-style characterization that I never want to see ever again. While Gaga has moments of brilliance and the potential for camp genius, he is just a disaster. Never confuse shit for chocolate, not even when the HFPA, SAG, and BFCA are feasting on manure as if it was Tartufo di Pizzo.
Bradley Cooper in LICORICE PIZZA
Like many PTA joints, Licorice Pizza features an endless cornucopia of actors capable of making the smallest of roles into the grandest of impressions. Cooper isn't my choice of MVP (that would be Harriet Sansom Harris) but his twisted caricature of Jon Peters is pretty great nonetheless. Intensely Hilarious and hilariously intense, the actor walks into the film with the energy of 10 atom bombs and never loses any of it. It's the perfect approach to the part, considering such a mad register can only exist in small doses. Sustaining such a thing through an extensive character arc would be impossible. In other words, the actor makes the roles' limitations into blessings. I haven't had this much fun with the obsessive repetition of a mispronounced word since Alden Ehrenreich couldn't say his line in Hail Caesar.
Ben Affleck in THE TENDER BAR
George Clooney's latest directorial effort is a tedious, visually inert, piece of tobacco-stained sentimentality. Some dimensions of memoirist metatext give it some interest, though the overall thing is lackluster. Inoffensive and dully enjoyable, The Tender Bar comes alive whenever Ben Affleck's on-screen, delivering one of the best performances in his career. With this and The Last Duel, one can say the actor's on a hot streak. He's found a level of confidence in front of the camera heretofore unexplored in his many movies. Here, as the protagonist's mentor uncle, Affleck is a magnetic presence, relaxed and effortlessly cool, able to negotiate warm feeling and familial nostalgia without falling into maudlin territory.
Mike Faist in WEST SIDE STORY
If you'd told me, months ago, that Riff would end up being the best part of the new West Side Story movie, I wouldn't have believed you. While Mercutio is one of the best characters of Romeo and Juliet, the same can't be said of his counterpart in the musical that transfers its forbidden love premise to midcentury New York. Russ Tamblyn's quite good in the '61 movie, but he still couldn't make Riff into a standout. Mike Faist, however, reinvents the role with the help of Spielberg's direction and Kushner's updated script. Athletic and with a feral predisposition, there's a desperate quality to his character. With Tony, one can almost feel the homoerotic anguish of a jilted lover. With Bernardo, there's an edge of existential panic to Riff's racism. None of this makes the character more likable, though. If anything, he's thornier than ever, a ferocious anti-hero who's a dead man walking way before he steps foot in the salty stage of his final stand. He can also sing and dance like nobody's business. What a star!
And now, it's time to vote.
You can vote until Sunday night. I'll write about the winning actor, and then this series will go on a short hiatus until the end of this awards season. Hope you've been enjoying reading the "Almost There" series as much as I've enjoyed writing it.