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| Scene from Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood |
Next to Best Picture, there are few fields as scrutinized annually at The Oscars as much as the four acting fields. Every year there is a constant buzz over who should've been nominated and what the final group represents to the industry. While there are hundreds of movies and thousands of performances to pull from, these are the 20 that were deemed worthy to make it to Hollywood's biggest night. What follows isn't meant to be a prediction of who should win, but how I feel the 20 nominations rate against each other, finding the best and worst in a group of talent that is now part of film history forever. Who deserved the cut, who didn't? Read on to find out.
1. Adam Driver (Marriage Story)
Category: Best Actor
The greatest tool of Adam Driver's performance is how much nuance can be taken from the film. To a certain mindset, he is the victim who is frustrated by having to change his entire life just to keep custody of his child. To others, he's more manipulative and self-pitying in the worst ways. Even then, by the time he sings Stephen Sondheim, there is something broken in him that you can't help feeling moved by. Driver has been giving high-caliber performances for about a decade now, and this is him reaching another echelon. This is a performance that comes with so much weight and fragility that it has no choice but to scar the viewer and leave them trying to heal from this sense of the damage that these two people threw on each other. The worst of all is that they're not necessarily angry at each other, but the stress only makes things worse than they are. Even then, the fact that neither actor comes out looking like a terrible person is the real achievement of these performances.
2. Scarlett Johansson (Marriage Story)
Category: Best Actress
The greatest showcase for acting in 2019 all came with two actors talking in a room. In the case of Scarlett Johansson, there's something distant about her that feels intentional from director Noah Baumbach's meticulous script. The audience only knows enough to know that she's taking it just as hard as Adam Driver, but has to compartmentalize it in a way that never makes her look vulnerable. It's why many moments become more striking, such as an early monologue where she realizes that she's never happy. By the time that the film's phenomenal argument scene shows up, there's so much to the performances that have been built up that breaks through in memorable, meaningful, and human ways. It's a scorcher of a performance and one that's near impossible to hate despite the film being about emotional drifting of two characters.
3. Florence Pugh (Little Women)
Category: Best Supporting Actress
While all of the love is deservedly thrown on Saoirse Ronan for Little Women, the real breakthrough is Florence Pugh's Amy March. Amy's place in history is often one of deep resentment, so to have a film that recontextualizes this so many adaptations later is a great achievement. It helps that Pugh's performance is full of small memorable moments, like when the "clearly not five-years-old" actress has to play that young. She gets so many emotional and provocative scenes that only help to make the story's exploration of women in society all the more interesting. It's the type of performance that serves the themes very well while standing out on their own as these rays of warmth. For the first time, people are praising Amy March and it's largely because of Pugh's performance and ability to make her much more likable and realistic than just about any other actress who came before.
4. Antonio Banderas (Pain and Glory)
Category: Best Actor
There's plenty of irony in Antonio Banderas' nomination here. Besides him being the only nominee of the 20 to not have multiple nominations, it's only his first. For a career full of spectacular performances, it feels strange to know that this is his first. Even then, what he does here is one of the great quiet performances in which an artist looks back on their life with such poetic artistry. To watch Banderas' face in various conversations is to see the slight ways that he places emotional understanding and maturity into his work, making his self-discoveries along the way all the more powerful. Considering that he's also suffering from medical conditions, the performance is layered with small intricacies that pop up in jarring ways, making him seem more vulnerable in the process. Every frail choice makes the performance better, and one can hope he's coming back to the Oscars circle sooner than later.
5. Saoirse Ronan (Little Women)
Category: Best Actress
It seems crazy how often Saoirse Ronan has shown up at The Oscars. This marks her fourth nomination, and yet it feels like her career is only starting to become greater. Here she takes on one of literature's greatest heroines with Jo March and finds a way to make her relevant to a modern text. She is a creative type, struggling to make the stories of women feel important to a bigger audience and in the process asks what value "Little Women" has when it seems like nothing happens. It's quietly a radical text and director Greta Gerwig's take is just as profound in how it subtly makes Jo into a much more complicated character, full of frustrations of being lonely and potentially queer. It's a performance that finds new substance that has otherwise been mined constantly for decades, adding new layers of empathy to her character and the story in general.
6. Laura Dern (Marriage Story)
Category: Best Supporting Actress
In a film whose characters feel like chess pieces leading to a predictive divorce, nobody feels as powerful as Laura Dern's lawyer. She is introduced with warmth, willing to listen as the battle plan is made for a potential court hearing. There is something about her listening that is charismatic, finding Dern at her absolute best. That's before the later scenes where she is let loose, allowing her strategy to take full effect. As much as she can be seen as an evil lawyer only wishing for the worst, there is something inherently true about the goals that sympathize her. This is the struggle of all women in a world that gives men the benefit of the doubt but expect them to be saints. It's a performance that serves as a sneak-attack that hits like a gut punch in a film largely about two people giving career-best performances.
7. Brad Pitt (Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood)
Category: Best Supporting Actor
In one of the more muddled Oscar conversations of 2019, this is Brad Pitt's year to finally win an Oscar. Nobody remembers that he's a prolific producer and won for 12 Years a Slave. Even then, there's enough weight in calling him the front-runner for this field because Quentin Tarantino knows how to write complicated men. Pitt's stuntman Cliff Booth is a figure who sells the journey of Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood with commentary on what his life really is worth when not working underneath his fading actor buddy. Whole essays could be written about what he represents to the bigger story about Hollywood's shift, and that's all before a third act that features some of Pitt's more charismatic and memorable acting in years. People forget that he's capable of telling a good joke while playing the masculine archetype, but this film allows Pitt to do a Pitt-style performance without it being a bad thing. It's the fading star as commentary, and rarely has it been this interesting.
8. Al Pacino (The Irishman)
Category: Best Supporting Actor
In a career full of eccentric performances, Al Pacino has rarely found a balance that's as invigorating as his Jimmy Hoffa. He's supposed to be a showman to his union brothers, but he's also allowed to be quiet and even vulnerable around Robert De Niro's Frank Sheeran. This is one of his most dynamic performances, managing to feel like the weight of his career in gangster cinema was leading to this self-reflecting performance. He is a man of principle, and by the end you buy into every argument he gets into, believing that his hubris is leading to a better world. He is, of course, a tragic figure, but that only makes his story all the more powerful. Nobody eats ice cream like Hoffa, and that is enough to keep us watching.
9. Jonathan Pryce (The Two Popes)
Category: Best Actor
There's a reluctant hero to be found in Jonathan Pryce's Pope Francis, whose past creates this hurdle for his future. Does he become pope in the face of a life of mistakes? It's through his conversations with Anthony Hopkins' Pope Benedict XVI that he opens up and conveys a warmth that makes him realize the value of learning from mistakes to try and do what's better for the church on a universal level. It helps that the discussion of simple pleasures like music and sports make him seem more human and even familiar. Beyond their different ideologies is this sense of bonding as people trying to be happy and fulfilled with their professions in life. The results are far more touching and entertaining than one would expect from a film like this.
10. Anthony Hopkins (The Two Popes)
Category: Best Supporting Actor
In the 21st century, there hasn't been a religious figure as notorious as Pope Benedict XVI, and it's in part because of his choice to step down from a lifelong position. That is part of what makes The Two Popes such a surprising and moving reassessment of his life. This isn't a story of a man losing faith, but trying to get it back by finding a successor whose value to the church will be greater appreciated than his. Benedict is weary, being only motivated by his FitBit to keep walking. Even then, to find the joys in his life through football and a TV show starring a crime-solving dog is to see the humanity of a man who is often seen as stuffy. It helps that it's one of Hopkins' most nuanced and touching performances in quite some time, allowing religion to only be one piece of a bigger puzzle about what it means to be happy.
11. Leonardo DiCaprio (Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood)
Category: Best Actor
In his second collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, Leonardo DiCaprio goes for the meta subtext with a performance about an actor fading into obscurity. Rarely has a role felt as tailor-made as this, managing to show DiCaprio's Rick Dalton holding onto sanity as he watches the young generation take away his job. It's more than wallowing, however, finding time for him to enjoy drinking beers with his buddy Cliff Booth and driving around the Sunset Strip in a blissful state. Even then, his best moments find him overcoming insecurity to deliver performances that may not be his best, but capture for the audience the thrill of performing before a camera, trying to make cornball dialogue sound natural. DiCaprio is such a master of acting that he makes even the hokiest moments pop with a deeper existential meaning, and elevates the film into a greater commentary on what it's like to grow old in Hollywood.
12. Joe Pesci (The Irishman)
Category: Best Supporting Actor
Behind the chemistry of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino is one of those great quiet performances. Whereas Joe Pesci's most memorable roles find him as a loudmouth, here he plays the quiet type whose insanity lies underneath the surface. He is a man who has power over others to do his dirty work, and it becomes strange to grapple with him. In some ways, he is a bigger voice of reason. In others, he may be far worse than anybody else in the film. De Niro is loyal to Pesci, and their partnership is as much a friendship as it is two men on a chain gang of criminal actions. In his quiet and even more vulnerable moments, he is giving one of his most nuanced performances, and one that doesn't require more than a smirk to make you feel comforted and scared within the same face. In a film full of complicated performances, Pesci gives the quietest but also the most effective supporting role in the group.
13. Joaquin Phoenix (Joker)
Category: Best Actor
After a decade in the arthouse crowd, Joaquin Phoenix has returned to blockbusters with one of the edgiest, most divisive comic book movies since Zack Snyder took over Superman. Here is a story that transcends the heightened fantasy and finds a man trying to stay sane in a society that has no choice but to dispose of him. He's going crazy, laughing uncontrollably, and taking the media to task for ruining his life. It's a Joker performance by way of Sidney Lumet commentary, and it's arguably the most discussed performance of 2019's awards group. So many bold decisions make this into a strange beast that has such memorable moments as dancing down a flight of stairs to a discussion as to whether the finale is fantasy or truth. While the film has a lot to give flack over, it's easy to argue that Phoenix classes up the joint and makes it impossible to fully write-off.
14. Scarlett Johansson (Jojo Rabbit)
Category: Best Supporting Actress
There's a lot that may seem crazy about this nomination on its surface, but it does speak to what makes Scarlett Johansson a tad underrated. Where Marriage Story will break your heart, Jojo Rabbit is a different kind of performance, often recalling satires by Mel Brooks and specifically Madeline Kahn in a performance that mixes wacky slapstick with a quest for deeper meaning. Whereas most other characters are negative in their cartoonish behavior, Johansson's use of humor feels like one of the most endearing attempts of a mother getting their child to look past their biases and see the world for what it is. Is it Johansson's best? Not really. However, it's a deserved nomination for how it finds humor and warmth in a film that takes cruelty to task in sometimes brutal fashion.
15. Cynthia Erivo (Harriet)
Category: Best Actor
It's incredible to think that in 2019, 106 years after Harriet Tubman died, that she has finally gotten the biopic treatment. A lot of credit must go to Cynthia Erivo, who really does enough to make the film an engaging tribute to a woman who by all accounts lived an amazing life. To watch her free slaves on the Underground Railroad and raise guns to any slaveholder that stood in her way is to see one of those great roles of confidence. While one could wish that there was more to the film beyond this (the post-script does tease interesting material for a sequel), it does enough to make the first outing feel like it matters, appealing to everyone who is either experts on her life or newcomers discovering her accomplishments for the first time. It could be better, but it's a crowd-pleaser at its core, and that's a decent enough way to introduce one of history's overdue icons.
16. Renee Zellwegger (Judy)
Category: Best Actress
There is nothing wrong with Renee Zellwegger's performance as Judy Garland. When she takes to the stage to perform, there is some magic that shines through. To hear her sing "The Trolley Song" is one of those moments that makes you wish that everything else about the film was great. Sure she plays the self-effacing downward spiral with emotional vulnerability, but there's not enough to make this film feel like a greater statement about Garland's career. She is sad, but there's not a lot of shocking resonance that makes this feel like an exceptional tribute. At most, it states the obvious very well: Garland got screwed over by the industry and she had no choice but to keep moving on. She may be haggard by the end, but her dedication to performing is often more interesting than what Zellwegger is doing here. It's good, but with better material, this could've felt like a Garland biopic worthy of further thought.
17. Charlize Theron (Bombshell)
Category: Best Actress
Ever since those first reactions, Charlize Theron has gotten praise for being an uncanny performance of Megyn Kelly. That is largely what sells her performance here and makes it an engaging oddity. Had the film been actually good and present a complicated view of modern conservatism is an important moment of history, this would've been one of the year's best. Instead, it skids by on Theron's natural gifts. She is one of the few characters who is allowed to feel vulnerable and has the meaty scenes where she gets to take down Roger Ailes, but they're all a bit underwhelming with a bad story. It does the trick but is one of those odd nominations that will likely make this film feel much better and more urgent than it ends up being. One can hope the Me Too Movement delivers a better film about the Fox News scandals depicted in Bombshell because they deserve it. With that said, it's really sad that Theron used up a really good performance on this turkey.
18. Tom Hanks (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood)
Category: Best Supporting Actor
It took 19 years and a category demotion for Tom Hanks to finally get back into the Oscar race. In one of the most obvious decisions, the nicest man in Hollywood chose to play the nicest man in public access TV: Fred "Mr." Rogers of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. There's nothing wrong with his performance, though it does fall a little short of feeling transcendent and meaningful by the end. It's a performance of listening and having characters around him opening up, and the charisma of Hanks does make it a heartwarming experience. However, there's not much that feels exceptional and makes this feel like a sympathy nomination when compared to the brilliant diverse body of work Hanks has done in the near two decades since Cast Away. If nothing else, this feels like the smallest performance this year, and the most underwhelming performance in Hanks' career since Larry Crowne in 2011.
19. Margot Robbie (Bombshell)
Category: Best Supporting Actress
There's a lot to hold against Bombshell failing to be the pressing Spotlight-caliber drama for the modern era. It's an important story that could give a deeper dive into how sexual harassment in the workplace impacts the bigger picture of a famous news network. It's true that Margot Robbie's performance has plenty of those uncomfortable moments, but what separates her from Charlize Theron's position on this list is that there's even less substance for the rest of her story. Had there been any thought into character and personal grief, there's a good chance that Bombshell would not only feel relevant but also feature some of the powerhouse performances that these actresses are capable of delivering. While people will remember Theron's Megyn Kelly for its uncanniness, nobody is likely to remember Robbie's Kayla Pospisil simply because she is harassed and earns easy sympathetic votes, but doesn't do enough to make her character feel vindicated by any actions that follow.
20. Kathy Bates (Richard Jewell)
Category: Best Supporting Actress
The thing that will always be memorable about this Oscar nomination was how it inspired a brief exchange between Kathy Bates and snubbed actor Adam Sandler (Uncut Gems) that lead to The Waterboy reunion we didn't know we wanted. Beyond that, this compelling drama is another solid late-era Clint Eastwood movie, but to say that Bates was the reason would be a lie. She plays the concerned mother to the far more compelling performance by Paul Walter Hauser's Richard, and it feels like the wrong performance got recognized. There's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't even have that exemplary Oscar-caliber scene that every other performance above this has. It's fine, but in a year where people complain that the Oscars need more diversity, this would be the easiest one to get rid of.
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