10 great previous performances from 2023's Oscar nominees

...and maybe should be what they got recognition for?

Jan 29, 2024

The Oscars are often great at providing belated prizes for performers who should have been rewarded earlier.

2023’s nominations and projected winners are … surprisingly pleasant in this regard. None of the frontrunners feel like an egregious makeup for actors coming down from their apex. Nonetheless, there’s not much of a hook to this newsletter without exploring the past performances of this year’s field of acting nominees. So if you want to explore these performers' back catalog, here’s where I might recommend starting.

EMILY BLUNT

Ok, it is patently absurd that Emily Blunt is getting her first Oscar nomination in the year of our Lord 2024. (We could easily have sacrificed one of the two Babel nominees in 2006’s Best Supporting Actress category to get her in for The Devil Wears Prada.) I don’t always love Blunt doing work as stoic and serious as she does in Oppenheimer, if for no other reason than she’s such a dynamic comedic performer. She can also blend it well with serious pathos, as she does in the late Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister. This fusion of screwball comedy with the mumblecore ethos is a low-key delight. Blunt’s Iris stumbles into an unexpected situation when she returns to the cabin she lent to her grieving friend Jack (Mark Duplass) only to discover he’s slept with her lesbian sister Hannah (the always great Rosemarie DeWitt).

Available for free with ads on Tubi.

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.

Blunt’s fellow Oppenhomie Robert Downey Jr. managed to retain and fuse some of his characteristic smarmy smugness into his Oppenheimer character, so it won’t feel quite as strange when he almost certainly wins Best Supporting Actor for the role. But if you want more of the unvarnished RDJ experience without needing to search Wikipedia for Marvel mythology, saddle up for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. That writer/director Shane Black’s meta tale of murder, intrigue, betrayal, and cinema works so well is a testament to the spin Downey puts on his thick narration. After robbing a game store, his character Harry runs unknowingly into a casting session for a role that is eerily reminiscent of the events of his law-breaking night. Taken for an incredible method actor, the producers claim him to be their “big discovery” and fly him out to Hollywood for the next round of preparations. From there, all bets are off … and a great watch is on.

Available to rent from various digital providers.

PAUL GIAMATTI

Tired: Marvel/DC comic book movies with intergalactic stakes. Inspired: comic book movies that come cut from the cloth of real life. Paul Giamatti’s Harvey Pekar is hardly super … or a hero in American Splendor. He’s just the self-loathing, self-obsessed main character of his life trying to live to fight another day. Writer/directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (who would later go onto direct a lot of Succession) find the herculean struggle in these everyday battles and draw them out in appropriately stylized ways. People might think Sideways is the blueprint for The Holdovers, but the tortured Giamatti leading man persona really kicked off a year earlier here.

Available on Max.

RYAN GOSLING

I am first, foremost, and forever in team “let Ryan Gosling be funny.” (Naturally, I am rooting for him to win the Oscar for Barbie, but not in a “mojo dojo casa house” kind of way.) But if he has to do his brooding thing, please let him do it under the watchful eye of Terrence Malick. His post-Tree of Life works set in contemporary times are quite controversial, but I’ve liked them more than I haven’t. Gosling headlines what might be my favorite, Song to Song, as an aspiring musician in the Austin scene. Because it’s still Malick, the modern-day setting takes on Biblical overtones as he tries to stay true to the song of life … and avoid being ensnared by the devilish music producer played by a wily Michael Fassbender.

Available for free with ads (through Freevee) on Amazon Prime Video.

LILY GLADSTONE

In the most devastating portion of Kelly Reichardt’s triptych of frustrated Pacific Northwesters, Certain Women, Lily Gladstone’s shy farmhand Jamie desperate for connection makes feeble attempts to befriend a community college adjunct professor, Kristen Stewart’s Beth Travis. For whatever reason, Beth has decided to take on an eight-hour roundtrip commute to teach a class which brings her no obvious intrinsic value or monetary gain. They share many a dinner but precious little of themselves. Gladstone makes quiet desperation absolutely suffocating, providing here a miniature of what she would later convey on a grander generational canvas in Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

Available on Criterion Channel.

SANDRA HÜLLER

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Justine Triet and Sandra Hüller had to collaborate again after the magic they made in 2019’s Sibyl. While Hüller commanded the lead in Anatomy of a Fall, she steals the show as a supporting player in Sibyl. Hüller plays a high-strung director trying to work with the titular psychotherapist of her leading actress to make her film, and she’s capable of making a meal out of a morsel. (Triet gives her more than that, in fairness.) I want a movie with just her character next.

Available on Amazon Prime Video.

CAREY MULLIGAN

Oh, look, another movie where Carey Mulligan plays the neglected wife of a man played by an actor obsessed with Leonard Bernstein! Only in Wildlife, Mulligan is actually the lead. (Sorry, Maestro awards campaign, I just don’t buy your spin that it’s as much her movie at all.) Through the eyes of a child, director Paul Dano shows the strain from the early ‘60s version of masculine pride. It’s Mulligan’s Jeannette left to hold what’s left of her family together as her husband (Gyllenhaal’s Jerry) takes a low-paying job fighting forest fires. Few pleasures compare to watching Mulligan keep her stiff upper lip … and inevitably, artfully crack.

Available for free with ads on Tubi.

CILLIAN MURPHY

“Like ten people saw it,” said Chris Evans about Danny Boyle’s sleeper indie sci-fi Sunshine. “All my good movies, no one sees.” You might well change your opinion of Evans’ acting skills if you watch it, but the film will probably just solidify the way you feel about Cillian Murphy. This might as well be a dry run for Oppenheimer as he plays Robert Capa, the physicist in charge of a bomb meant to reignite a fading sun in a not-too-distant future. He’s but one of many on board an Alien-like space crew as it hurdles toward mission completion. Because this is a script by Alex Garland (Annihilation, Ex Machina), perhaps it’s no surprise that the biggest obstacle to saving mankind is the species’ own indomitable sense of self-interest.

Available to rent from various digital providers.

DA’VINE JOY RANDOLPH

Dolemite Is My Name clearly exists first and foremost as a vehicle for Eddie Murphy to embody blaxploitation legend Rudy Ray Moore in all his glorious absurdity. But if you watch this movie and come out of it talking about anyone other than Da’Vine Joy Randolph, you must not have been paying much attention. She burns up the screen as Lady Reed, one of Moore’s cinematic muses, in a true “star is born” performance. With Randolph all but assured of winning Best Supporting Actress for The Holdovers, we should be thankful it took just 4 short years to make good on the promise of that breakout role.

Available on Netflix.

EMMA STONE

Sure, it’s not as virtuosic as her physically committed turn in Poor Things, but her incarnation of tennis great Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes is a star turn in a different way for Emma Stone. She’s so effortlessly able to slip into another character — a woman fighting for acceptance for what she does and who she is during an unforgiving time — while still maintaining that core quality of likability and identification. I think Emma Stone has emerged as one of our generation’s great actresses, and the fact that she’s able to so significantly elevate the film (my full review here) speaks to the extent of her talent.