10 great previous performances from 2024's Oscar nominees
...and maybe should be what they got recognition for?
For 20 people, it came true.
The Oscar nominations were announced last week, and any number of snubs and surprises pieces noted those whose names weren’t announced among the nominated performers — Daniel Craig! Marianne Jean Baptiste! Denzel Washington! Nicole Kidman! Margaret Qualley!
But anyway, they aren’t the focus of today’s newsletter.
It’s a widely recognized observation that an Academy Award nomination is often a lagging indicator of a career’s worth of great work. Who can forget Julianne Moore’s career-topping work in Still Alice? When everyone thinks of the great Pacino performances, the first place they go is Scent of a Woman, right?
So today, I take a look at the present crop of Oscar-nominated performers by glancing at past roles that deserved some recognition in their own right.
TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET
There’s something about young adults staring at each other from across the chasm of their twenties that inspires odd, imbalanced and fascinating relationships. Not enough films investigate these strange connections like Julia Hart’s Miss Stevens, which understands this reciprocal exchange as it plays out between its titular teacher Rachel Stevens, played by Lily Rabe, and her rambunctious student Billy, played by a pre-superstardom Timothée Chalamet. His instincts are superb in bringing Billy, an old soul trapped in an impulsive teen’s body, to life. Chalamet threads that thin needle of being smarter than the character but never lets that on while making boneheaded decisions. It’s a real preview of what was to come for him in everything from Call Me By Your Name to A Complete Unknown, and real Timmy fans need to know deep cuts like this one. He resists lazy conventions of the sullen goth propagated in teen fiction, turning Billy into a beautiful set of contradictions.
Available on YouTube (shh) because it’s not currently streaming anywhere.
KIERAN CULKIN
I’m sick of people writing off Kieran Culkin’s mesmeric performance in A Real Pain as just a lazy reheat of his character Roman Roy from Succession. Actors with an extraordinary talent at doing a specific thing should not be penalized! When looking at the long ark of Culkin’s career, it’s possible to see how much depth and dimension he’s added to the archetype of the lovable little shit. 2002’s The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys shows an early incarnation of the actor’s great paradox: while stunted and immature, he’s also a fountain of unexpected insightfulness and wisdom. Culkin tears up the screen as Tim, a troubled teen rebelling against the strict confines of his Catholic education. He’s magnetic as a character as pitiable as he is powerful in his mischievous ways.
Available for free with ads through Vudu/Fandango.
COLMAN DOMINGO
“I don’t go in with the intention to steal a scene,” Colman Domingo told me back in 2020, “But I know for sure that I want my characters to be in the center of their own existence. They’re in their own story no matter what.” It’s about damn time that the ever-charismatic Domingo, a true actor’s actor, gets the spotlight in films like Sing Sing. But part of the reason he laughed off my description of himself as a scene-stealer is because he imbues every character with main character energy. “You have something called Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I’m sure Cutler believed it was Cutler’s Black Bottom,” he told me of his great supporting turn from 2020 opposite Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. He plays proxy to Davis’ Ma Rainey with such aplomb that it’s easy to miss he’s the secret glue of the whole film.
CYNTHIA ERIVO
If I’m just being honest, Wicked wasn’t Cynthia Erivo’s best performance released in 2024. I also don’t think she was very good in Wicked, but that’s another conversation. I’d rather just praise her brilliant turn in Anthony Chen’s Drift, a film that bombed at Sundance 2023 but deserves a closer look. Erivo is undeniably compelling doing the exact opposite of what she does in Wicked: being small. As a mysterious figure who scrapes by an itinerant existence on the margins of tourist traps in Greece, she holds the screen by shrinking herself. Hers is a performance of brilliant introversion and stillness, all of which is in service of hiding an uncomfortable truth about her past that the movie slowly reveals to us. This is the movie that convinced me that Erivo, a star of the stage for her ability to project to the back of the rafters, can translate those skills into the intimacy of the small screen.
Available to rent from various digital platforms.
DEMI MOORE
I’m not the biggest fan of The Substance, but it’s hard to begrudge Demi Moore a nomination for Best Actress. The film really rides or dies on both her commitment to the project and the lifetime of screen imagery associated with her iconography. There’s no better place to see that than in Ghost, the only other film where she ever came close to awards season glory with a Golden Globe nomination. You could argue she’s probably the least interesting of the three leads in this sappy, sweeping romance that made America swoon in the summer of 1990. But you must believe that Moore is a romantic lead worth Patrick Swayze taking all the effort to reconnect with from the other side of the grave. Moore has that ineffable quality making you buy into the whole concept, no matter how ridiculous it might seem.
EDWARD NORTON
A fourth Oscar nomination for A Complete Unknown inches Edward Norton closer to “it’s time” territory. I get the sense he really thought he had it with Motherless Brooklyn, an adaptation of the Jonathan Lethem novel he shepherded to screen as both director and screenwriter. “The initial draw he felt to the material had to do with the actorly challenge of portraying a private investigator with Tourette's syndrome,” I noted in my review of NYFF 2019. “The role of Lionel Essrog represents the kind of bauble designed to appeal to an actor's vanity, a character racked with internal conflict that manifests in a physical way. If the film existed as little more than an apparatus to prop up this showy performance, it would have clouded out the real metaphorical value of Lionel as he slowly pulls back the veil on corruption in 1950s New York City […] His film makes for a somber, plaintive, and clever twist on the film noir. Taking significant liberties with Lethem's novel, beginning with changing the setting to mid-century America, Norton frames Lionel's gumshoe exploits within a wistfulness for a city – and country – lost.”
Available to rent from various digital platforms.
GUY PEARCE
Warner Brothers’ loss to not realize the tremendous talent they had on their hands with Guy Pearce. (Maybe their woes didn’t start with Zaslav after all!) I’m so glad The Brutalist finally made his unparalleled skill at being the sixth man/“that guy” most movies need. I could spotlight some movies that I think are objectively better here because Pearce has great taste (ahem, The Rover). But there’s nothing that showcases just how much he can improve a film quite like Lawless, a perfectly entertaining Prohibition-era saga of the bootlegging Bondurant family led by Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy. The brothers’ exploits are engaging enough, but the movie needs the strong adversary that Guy Pearce provides in Charlie Rakes, a well-groomed city cop with a cringe-worthy butt part and no eyebrows. It’s not often I root so vehemently against a villain, but thanks to Pearce, we see the blackness of his heart and the coldness of his soul laid bare across the screen. As he attempts to foil the family enterprise in what was then known as “the wettest county in the world,” screenwriter Nick Cave and Pearce keep us leaning in.
Available to rent from various digital platforms.
ISABELLA ROSSELLINI
Isabella Rossellini got a bit of a “what the hell, sure”-esque nomination for her small but mighty turn in Conclave. It’s clear they liked the film, and this screen legend (one of our all-time great nepo babies) had still somehow never been recognized by the Academy. Though hot take: I prefer another turn of hers from this year of a similar size in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. As the mother of the lost love to Josh O’Connor’s tomb raider Arthur, she’s a forceful yet quiet presence representing the simple decency and stability that otherwise eludes the chimerical protagonist. There’s also a beautiful connection between Rossellini’s presence and how the Italian director Rohrwacher linked up with English-speaking actor O’Connor — like Rossellini’s own parents, they connected via letters before starting a fruitful collaboration. “In terms of Josh and I, I don’t think we will end up getting married,” Rohrwacher joked to me, “but we will get married professionally!” (They’d better!)
ZOE SALDAÑA
I think I’ve made my thoughts well-known on Emilia Pérez by now, but the nomination from the film I begrudge the least is handily Zoe Saldaña. The narrative is pretty great for her: a workhorse who’s been a part of the three highest-grossing movies of all time, not to mention the Star Trek franchise. Saldaña is frequently green, blue, or something otherworldly, and Emilia Pérez offers her the chance to play a flesh-and-blood human. (Albeit one who has to sing the words “Hello very nice to meet you / I’d like to know about sex change operation” with a straight face.) The performance panache on display harkens back to her breakout role in 2000’s Center Stage, an otherwise boilerplate teen movie taking place at the American Ballet Academy. Saldaña’s Eva Rodríguez is a smart-talking firecracker of energy who bristles against the rigid formality of her education. Because of her race and class position, Eva is often forced to learn tough lessons well ahead of her peers. The grace and grit needed to persevere are lessons that Saldaña has put to work in the quarter-century since Center Stage; after all, how many of the other young performers in that cast have gone onto much of a career?
Available to rent from various digital platforms.
If you liked today’s newsletter, maybe you’d be curious in reading my deep-dive into The Brutalist star Adrien Brody’s Oscar-winning turn in The Pianist…
…or my conversation with This Had Oscar Buzz co-host Chris Feil on how the awards game works.
Whatever floats your boat, you can get double the posts from Marshall and the Movies by moving up to my paid tier!
No Other Land is back in theaters at Film Forum in New York this Friday. Here’s my interview with two of its four filmmakers on Slant Magazine.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
More on Sundance next week.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
An annual delight to break down what didn’t get nominated with Joe Reid and Chris Feil of This Had Oscar Buzz.
Wondering why it’s all but impossible to see the Oscar-nominated No Other Land? Here’s a great feature from the IDA on how the frontrunner for Best Documentary Feature still doesn’t have a domestic distributor.
Whether you’re just catching up with Nickel Boys thanks to the Best Picture nomination or still unable to shake it off, I’d recommend reading ’ contextualization of the film for The New York Times (gift article) in a group of revolutionary Black works reconfiguring time.
Danette Chavez at The A.V. Club has quite the essay on the evolution of the paranoid thriller on TV. I’m woefully behind on all my small-screen viewing, but this makes me want to check some of the shows out.
Something fun is coming for paid subscribers this weekend about a legendary documentarian!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall