Despite how flawed I think they can be and how often they don’t actually match up with the best in a year of cinema, I have such a deep and eternal love for the Academy Awards. I have followed them obsessively since I was about fourteen and despite how much I may question their choices, I do place a deep importance in their decisions and respect them as an awards body. This year I think it’s a pretty fantastic slate of films at the centre, better than many recent years, and they did nominate many of what I do believe to be some of the best
performances of the year (Kristen Stewart, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ariana DeBose, Kirsten Dunst, Jessie Buckley, Penélope Cruz, Benedict Cumberbatch, etc.) However, as I said, they of course never represent all of the true best performances of the year and there are so many who were ignored. I thought about structuring this like a ranked list of the top 5 performances not nominated or something, but that was tough to narrow down I also
wanted to cover all 4 of the acting categories so instead (although I did kinda cheat with one category), here is what I believe to be the best performance not nominated for an Oscar in each acting category this year.
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE: Mike Faist – West Side Story
Sometimes a performance completely sheds any obvious or binary acting strategies or any sense of fictitious melodrama and just becomes a sheer force of energy. I don’t think there’s any one scene you could select as an obvious ‘Oscar clip’ for Mike Faist, and I mean that as a compliment because it is such a naturalistic but absolutely unparalleled explosion of expression from start to finish. Besides the fact that he is a phenomenal dancer who has incredible abilities in how he extends his body, it’s an extremely physical performance from his face to his hands, and from the first second that Riff appears on screen, his presence is honestly assaulting. I was absolutely mesmerised and nothing else in West Side Story ever comes close to the sheer energy or magnetism of Mike Faist. I knew he wasn’t going to be nominated despite being far and away the best male supporting performance of the year and I will still celebrate his one-off BAFTA nomination as a consolation, but every time I think about the fact that J.K. Simmons is nominated this year for Being the Ricardos and Mike Faist is not (with no disrespect to J.K. Simmons generally speaking because he’s an actor I love who has given many great performances in the past) I have to laugh, it’s just comical.
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE: Ruth Negga – Passing
This one hurt because Ruth Negga is the only person that I’m mentioning in this piece who was considered pretty much a guarantee to actually be nominated. She got in at the Golden Globes, SAG and BAFTA so it honestly baffles me how she missed out right at the end here. And regardless of the likeliness or unlikeliness of her being nominated, there is no question that she deserved to be because her work in Passing is just sublime. She plays an incredibly intricate and complicated character in Clare. For the film to work and properly convey its themes, Clare has to be both difficult to read with often questionable behaviour, yet also incredibly empathetic which Negga masters. She is so instantly charismatic and has one of the most striking first scenes I’ve seen from a film character in recent memory. I don’t mean this as any insult to Tessa Thompson who is compelling in the lead role, however every second that Ruth Negga is in frame she just dominates the screen. It is impossible to take your eyes off Clare and to not be sucked in by her voice. For what I would argue is one of the most difficult characters of the year to successfully convey, Ruth Negga does masterful work with Clare and Passing, which I enjoyed, would be absolutely nothing without her. If we assume that Judi Dench’s surprise nomination for Belfast was simply replacing Caitriona Balfe for Belfast (side note: insane swich up just to get the bigger name actress because Balfe is monumentally better than Dench in that film), then it is Jessie Buckley who got Ruth Negga’s assumed spot for The Lost Daughter. And this is such a shame because I love that Jessie Buckley performance and think it’s a great surprise nomination (plus it’s such a shame they had to pit the two Irish actresses against each other!). However, I desperately wanted Ruth Negga to be nominated and think she’s honestly miles better than everyone in the category except Ariana DeBose. So I am both thrilled for Jessie Buckley and celebrate that nomination while honestly maintaining that Ruth Negga still deserved the spot over her.
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE: Cooper Hoffman – Licorice Pizza
I don’t know if I could call it the objective best performance of the year (I mean does anyone have that authority?) but, it is without a doubt my personal favourite from any actor or actress. It’s startling because son of the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman; Cooper Hoffman, who had never acted before, had such an insane pressure on him. He was carrying all of the baggage of his father’s immense talent and legacy and I was concerned that I would not be able to view his performance free of that. However, from the minute that Licorice Pizza opened and I was introduced to Gary Valentine, I was immediately freed of that and was completely captivated. In Gary’s smooth talking, suave ways masking his jittery teen angst, Hoffman is unimaginably charismatic. He has a magnetic screen presence that makes him impossible not to adore. He admittedly doesn’t have to go for some of the deep pain or tragedy that other actors were tasked and I think that is probably partially why his performance has been so overlooked in the Licorice Pizza conversation. But his comedic delivery is brilliant and more importantly there is also a deep sincerity he brings to Gary which just made me adore him. I knew that this nomination would never happen right from the beginning of award season when all he got was the Golden Globe nomination (and that’s only because they do separate categories for Drama and Comedy/Musical so there’s double the slots), but it remains the performance that has been the most memorable and important to me out of any others in the year.
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE: Renate Reinsve – The Worst Person in the World, Alana Haim – Licorice Pizza, Rachel Zegler – West Side Story
Okay I’m sorry, I cheated for this one and couldn’t just pick one or even two of these women. I can defend it though because I think rather than just wanting to highlight individual performances that should have been nominated, this really represents a wider issue in the Lead Actress category this year at the Oscars. And that is that the Academy seem to have such a severe aversion to nominating young or up-and-coming performers and such an obsession with celebrating beloved industry veterans with previous nominations under their belt for giving performances that are arguably not even among their best. The core of this analysis is Nicole Kidman and Jessica Chastain. Kidman is a legend and Chastain is slowly working her way towards that territory and they are both undeniably extremely talented. However, I think neither Being the Ricardos nor The Eyes of Tammy Faye are particularly impressive or memorable films. And while both performances are good, they’re lacking in complexity and I think it’s such a stretch to say that either are among the best of the year. I am obviously not including Kristen Stewart in this analysis because it’s her first nomination, she is still only just breaking into the A-list/mainstream stratosphere and she’s rightfully nominated for a fantastic performance in a compelling auteur drama with Spencer. I also think Penélope Cruz is pretty phenomenal in Parallel Mothers so that was a pleasant surprise nomination and Olivia Colman gives probably her most impressive performance to date in The Lost Daughter. However, even Cruz and Colman, as much as I was impressed by their performances, still feel like they represent a loyalty to industry favourites over any newcomers. This is especially true if it is assumed that Cruz took what I hoped was the Alana Haim spot. It’s such a shame to see a roundup of the usual suspects (again excluding Kristen) who all have previous nominations under their belt when it was a year of such memorable performances from younger, less experienced actresses.
Renate Reinsve absolutely shines in The Worst Person in the World in an incredibly enigmatic and magnetic performance as Julie that feels reminiscent of Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha. The film really is built around her and it all hinges on you finding Julie likeable and having an instinct to root for her despite some of her actions, which is easy when Reinsve males her so innately likeable. I’ve never particularly cared about the band Haim, but musician-turned-actress Alana Haim is unbelievably impressive in her first acting role.
Alana Kane, whom she plays in Licorice Pizza, is in many ways an even more challenging character than Julie and in other hands may have been quite unlikeable or off-putting. However, as well as the fact that she has great comedic delivery and charisma and is able to go toe-to-toe with Cooper Hoffman in that way, Haim’s biggest strength is that she is incredibly emotive. There are many key moments where she silently emotes and is able to convey so much with little to no dialogue. It’s an extremely impressive skill for an unexperienced actress to possess. And speaking of being a newcomer to the acting world, nobody embodies this more than Rachel Zegler who was so young and really plucked out of obscurity for her first ever role in West Side Story. I have seen the film multiple times now and as I’ve indicated, I really think it has so many of the best performances of the year including Ariana DeBose and Mike Faist. However, the first time I saw it, my immediate takeaway was that Rachel Zegler is an absolute star. While some of her more dramatic moments don’t feel quite as naturalistic or effortless as I think they could with a little more experience, there is just an enchanting draw to her Maria and her abilities of facial expression and physicality are captivating.
This sounds cliched but I really cannot imagine anyone else conveying Maria as well as this. A lot of this can obviously be attributed to Tony Kushner for his script, but she really does a lot to add depth and intellect and complexity to a female character who has historically been quite one-dimensional. I should mention as an aside that she also quite literally has the voice of an angel. She is so memorable and it really is one of those rare cinematic experiences where you see a performance from someone who is new to the game and immediately know this person is going to be a star.
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