One of the worst aspects of awards season is watching group after group barely deviate from the same small group of names all prognosticators seem to have in their pool. (Are those folks good at predictions, or are awards bodies just too lazy to look past the punditry?)
On the other hand, one of most exciting aspects of awards season is the rush of satisfaction when an awards-giving body manages to defy conventional wisdom and select a performance that hasn’t arrived pre-anointed as a certified Oscar contender – potentially bringing that work a great deal of additional attention. Almost every year has a dozen or more candidates worthy of this recognition in the acting categories alone; all they need are awards voters willing to take notice (or, barring that, viewers to seek them out anyway).
For those interested in thinking outside of the same old awards bait boxes, here are 12 performances from 2023 whose major awards chances fall somewhere between unlikely and nigh-impossible. They deserve serious consideration from anyone with a ballot in hand – or simply the desire to sample some great acting.
Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario
For some years, Nicolas Cage made so many low-rent movies that it was hard to keep track of his comings and goings. Now he’s given so many comeback performances that we may have started to take him for granted. Case in point: he gives one of his best performances in the darkly comic Dream Scenario as Paul Matthews, a seemingly mild-mannered college professor whose insecurities and seething desperation are laid bare when he inexplicable starts popping up in people’s dreams, like a benign (at first, anyway) Freddy Kreuger. But the very smallness of the performance that makes it so devastatingly effective – funny, humane, yet as unsparing as writer-director Kristoffer Borgli needs it to be – also makes it easy to overlook compared to the over-the-top emoting of Mandy, the self-satirizing comedy of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent or even the quiet intensity of Pig (not that those got enough awards attention, either). Altering the pitch of his voice into a needy wheedle, barely suppressing his glee at the brief burst of positive attention, and turning his very mildness into menace in some of the dream sequences, Cage contains multitudes in a single regular-guy role.
Penélope Cruz, Ferrari
It’s hard to believe that Penélope Cruz playing a steely, spurned wife who pulls a gun on her great-man husband in an accessible biopic isn’t an instant awards-season contender – and it’s possible that sheer Academy affection will prevail and send her to the Oscars anyway. But so far, awards buzz for Ferrari has been muted, which is especially strange for Cruz, who dominates her every scene as Laura Ferrari, wife of Enzo and controller of the purse strings at his imperiled automobile company. Laura could easily be turned into a broad caricature; Cruz makes her rage and frustration by turns heartbreaking and wickedly funny, with a sense of control that fits the Ferrari name.
Matt Damon, Oppenheimer
There will probably be very few ways that Oppenheimer will qualify as overlooked at Oscar time (though its visual effects have already been inexplicably left off of the long list for that award). But with a teeming who’s-who supporting cast, both prognosticators and studio campaigners are bound to focus in on a handful of individuals, and it seems like Robert Downey Jr is the consensus supporting-actor choice. Here’s a case, however, where a more crowd-pleasing performance deserves just as much recognition. As Gen Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, Damon masters the art of movie-star directness – a military man recast as a bluntly beleaguered project manager. Damon’s taste for dad movies has rarely been better served.
Mia Goth, Infinity Pool
Goth was already overlooked last year for her bravura work as a farm girl with big, thwarted dreams in the horror melodrama Pearl (spun off from an equally impressive dual role in X, the movie’s immediate predecessor). So it’s not surprising that she wouldn’t get much attention for a smaller part in a January release that’s not as good as either of those Ti West movies. On the other hand, Goth is searingly and hilariously memorable in Brandon Cronenberg’s sci-fi horror show, moving from seductive to cruelly mocking to completely unhinged, reveling at every step in the decay of her fun-rich-gal facade. There is no off-kilter line delivery I’ve imitated more frequently over the past year than Goth’s shrieking address to “people of the bus!”
Marin Ireland, Birth/Rebirth
Marin Ireland had a killer year – but doesn’t she always? One of the best character actors in the game stole Eileen from Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway with a single monologue, provided the most memorable moments in the Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman, and brought vivid, privileged menace to the as-yet-unreleased festival title Somewhere Quiet. She also had a too-rare leading role in Birth/Rebirth, a Frankenstein-influenced slice of body-and-beyond horror, as Rose Casper, a pathologist with sharp instincts for creation, if not necessarily traditional maternity. Opposite the also-excellent Judy Reyes playing a grieving mom, Ireland affirms her ability to embody a fascinating variation on a scream queen: a determined and capable woman whose humanity has a monstrous side.
Jennifer Lawrence, No Hard Feelings
In the most buzzed-about scene of No Hard Feelings, the movie and its star, Jennifer Lawrence, goof around with the conventions of tasteful modesty of romcom sexuality, demurely obscuring its lead characters for a skinny-dipping scene – only to have worldwide superstar Lawrence emerge from the ocean fully nude to beat the holy hell out of some clothes-stealing interlopers. This scene could also double as satire of the kind of “brave” nudity that tends to court awards attention, while outdoing more self-serious barings in pure chutzpah. Lawrence isn’t just great while naked in No Hard Feelings; her role as Maddie, a 30ish woman who accepts payment to bring a teenage boy out of his shell, stands among her best and most well-rounded work as an actor (and a more natural fit than the scene-stealing but mismatched-age performances in David O Russell’s films, all three of which netted her Oscar nominations). Her physical comedy is aces, her delivery slams dozens of lines home, and yet we never lose sight of Maddie as a believable person with real regrets, hang-ups and emotional issues. That Lawrence isn’t really in the awards conversation is further proof of how little respect comedy gets, even when it’s done this well.
Teyonah Parris, They Cloned Tyrone
Parris is probably most recognizable as Monica Rambeau, found-family niece of Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) over in the MCU. She played Monica charmingly in this year’s ill-fated (but fun!) space adventure The Marvels, but her real standout in 2023 was a part closer to ground level: Yo-Yo, a sex worker who becomes one-third of an unlikely trio investigating a mysterious conspiracy in the sci-fi comedy They Cloned Tyrone. Parris ensures Yo-Yo never threatens to become a crude stereotype, inflecting her commentary with resourcefulness and blindsiding, often-hilarious good cheer – a star turn with teeth, matching the equally funny Jamie Foxx (as well as a more stoic John Boyega) in every scene.
Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson, Asteroid City
Wes Anderson employs such sprawling casts of major names that picking out a name or two to highlight might seem daunting. Yet Anderson does have a keen sense of when to let actors tease some greater emotional depth out of their deadpan delivery and when to let them serve as pure comic dessert or provide the briefest of grace notes. That’s never more evident than when watching Asteroid City, in which everyone from Steve Carell to Margot Robbie to Matt Dillion to Tom Hanks to Edward Norton does wonderful work, and two figures emerge from the starry cast and spectacular sets to stand further apart anyway. Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson technically play multiple characters via Anderson’s nested narrative structure – at one point Johansson is playing an actor playing an actor playing an actor – which makes the connections they forge all the more remarkable. Schwartzman opens up small windows of grief while maintaining quintessentially Andersonian restraint, the rare performance that becomes more open-hearted and moving when it fully breaks the fourth wall. Johansson, meanwhile, touchingly creates a kind of alternate-world Marilyn Monroe who finds grace and composure in the self-acceptance of her own woundedness. Often positioned opposite each other like Peanuts characters leaning on a brick wall, the two performers combust from afar.
Tilda Swinton, The Killer
Another member of the Asteroid City ensemble is Swinton, who has done some of her most outré and show-offy work in small supporting roles for Anderson and others. Yet in both Asteroid City and David Fincher’s The Killer, she holds back on the shapeshifting quirkiness, and still has no trouble with her usual scene-stealing. She’s particularly concise and larcenous in The Killer, as a well-to-do assassin, assigned to kill Michael Fassbender’s fellow gun-for-hire, who is distressed but mordantly philosophical when Fassbender tracks her down first. Over a flight of whiskey, she pokes and prods at his professional quirks – and, by extension, her own. It’s a tiny role, and one that it’s hard to imagine another performer killing quite so perfectly.
Teyana Taylor, A Thousand and One
In AV Rockwell’s decade-spanning family drama, Teyana Taylor updates Douglas Sirk-style melodrama to the gentrifying New York City of the 1990s and 2000s, putting a face to the struggles of disadvantaged, imperfect single motherhood. Women fighting for their children are often Academy Award favorites, but maybe there was something too unflinching about Taylor’s performance; though she’s been working in the music industry as a choreographer, singer and dancer for years, her Inez doesn’t betray an ounce of showbiz vanity, and holds the movie together through some potentially ill-advised turns. Taylor’s work in A Thousand and One has been recognized with an Independent Spirit nomination and some other accolades, but the Oscars often prefer their melodrama less dimensionalized.
Donnie Yen, John Wick: Chapter 4
If there’s one genre less respected than comedy by awards bodies, it’s action, which is a shame – at their best, action stars are giving physical performances with a high degree of difficulty while still inhabiting a character, closer to dance than the pure athletics that might prompt an unfair dismissal. That’s particularly true of Donnie Yen as Caine in John Wick: Chapter 4. On paper, Caine represents several old pulp standbys – the blind assassin; the worthy rival who doesn’t want to kill the hero, but must – and Yen imbues him with personality both through movement, as in a standout sequence where he uses a little plastic motion sensors to detect and dispatch his enemies, and in his dialogue scenes opposite Wick (Keanu Reeves). Yen is the essence of a great supporting actor, playing a part that isn’t always central to the action (and could be swapped out with a less interesting character), but making the film richer and more colorful every time he appears.
