In some years the twenty acting spots at the Academy Awards are overflowing with former winners and nominees. This year only Best Actor has multiple former nominees, and there is but one of them who already has an Oscar at home.
Sebastian Stan is the only of the five enjoying his first nomination. After starting out on the TV series
"Gossip Girl" and some smaller supporting roles he raised his profile when he signed onto the MCU as
Captain America: The First Avenger's Bucky Barnes who became The Winter Soldier in subsequent films and series (including in the upcoming
Thunderbolts). He wisely used his newfound fame to seek out decidedly non-MCU-ish projects when he wasn't Bucky, the best of them being Jeff Gillooly to Margot Robbie's infamous Olympic skater in
I, Tonya (2017). In
The Apprentice he portrays the younger Donald Trump, learning ruthlessness and lack of accountability from Roy Cohn. At a time when every late-night talk show host and everybody else can do a Trump impression, Stan gives some nice nuances to one of the least-nuanced people on the planet. He won't win, but he is determined to be more than a square-jawed action star who looks good shirtless.
Colman Domingo is one of those thirty-year overnight success stories. Toiling on stage and the occasional TV gig since the 1990s, working steadily in the 21st Century, but it wasn't until his roles in AMC's
"Fear the Walking Dead" and HBO's
"Euphoria" that he started being seen as more than just "that guy". In 2022 he won an Emmy for the HBO show, and since then his career has been everything he must have dreamed it would turn into. Last year he was nominated as Best Actor portraying an oft-forgotten Civil Rights figure Bayard
Rustin, and he's right back again for
Sing Sing, playing another real person, this time an inmate instrumental in the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at the infamous New York Maximum Security Prison. Domingo shines once again, but it'd be a huge upset to hear his name called on Sunday. At age fifty-five, I sincerely hope we are seeing just the beginning of his Oscar run.
While Colman won't win, just having back-to-back nominations as Best Actor is a nice, relatively rare feat. The only three others to do so this century are Denzel Washington for
Fences (2016) and
Roman J. Isreal, Esq. (2017), Colin Firth for
A Single Man (2009) and
The King's Speech (2010), and Russell Crowe who had three in a row with
The Insider (1999),
Gladiator (2000), and
A Beautiful Mind (2001).
Ralph Finnes has enjoyed a wonderful career, and he rose from emerging British actor to an international movie star very quickly. He made a rather splashy debut in a TV project playing T.E. Lawrence, the role that made Peter O’Toole a star, in
”A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia” (1992) and Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff (one of Laurence Olivier’s beloved star turns) with Juliette Binoche as Cathy in
Wuthering Heights (1992). The very next year he was seen the world over as Amon Goeth in Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List (1993). That resulted in his first Oscar nomination, losing Best Supporting Actor to Tommy Lee Jones in
The Fugitive. From there it was portraying Charles Van Doren in Robert Redford’s
Quiz Show (1994) and Anthony Minghella’s
The English Patient (1996), where he received his second Oscar nomination, losing Best Actor to Geoffrey Rush in
Shine.
From that point on Finnes became rather omnipresent, moving seamlessly from prestigious arthouse fare to blockbusters, playing comedy and drama, heroes and villains. He worked with great directors like Neil Jordan, Kathryn Bigelow, David Cronenberg, Sam Mendes, Fernando Meirelles, Martin McDonagh, Wes Anderson, and The Coen Brothers. He got attached to some big franchises: M to Daniel Craig’s 007 in the James Bond series, Hades in the
Clash of the Titans reboots, and of course He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named in the Harry Potter series. Somehow with all of that amazing work he hadn’t managed another Oscar nomination since 1996, though for my money he could have and probably should have been nominated for at least one of if not all of the performances in
Spider (2002),
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014),
A Bigger Splash (2015), and
The Menu (2022).
He has finally made the Academy cut again at the center of Edward Berger’s
Conclave. Ralph is now sixty-two, though to be fair he has seemed middle-aged since he came on the scene. This shouldn’t be his last best chance to win an Academy Award as he works so much and has a great nose for material. He’ll likely emerge from this nomination 0 for 3, but that does not diminish how spectacular a career he is putting together.
Adrien Brody holds the record as the youngest man to win Best Actor. He was twenty-nine when he won for Polanski's
The Pianist (2002), edging out Richard Dreyfuss, who was thirty when he won for
The Goodbye Girl (1977). Brody had not been nominated since and is now weeks away from his fifty-second birthday. In
The Brutalist he plays another Holocaust survivor, this time a fictional one who managed to emerge from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He was a promising architect before the War, and though psychologically fragile he is coaxed back into architecture while wrestling with his many demons. In
The Pianist we watched Władysław Szpilman wither away in fearful isolation. In
The Brutalist, we watch László Tóth suffer the longterm after-effects of the Holocaust as well as the savagery he is confronted with in America. Throughout Award Season Brody has been the favorite, winning the Golden Globe, Critics Choice, and BAFTA awards.
If anybody is going to upset the favorite, it’ll be
Timothée Chalamet. He just turned twenty-nine, and if he does win he will replace Adrein Brody as the youngest ever Best Actor winner. This is already Timothée’s second nomination, having gotten the Best Actor nod seven years ago for
Call Me By Your Name (2017). That was the year Gary Oldman won his long-overdue Oscar for
The Darkest Hour. 2017 was when the era of Chalamet truly began, not only for his acclaimed work in
Call Me By Your Name but also supporting roles in Greta Gerwig’s
Lady Bird and Scott Cooper’s
Hostiles. The next year he shone again as the drug-addicted son in
Beautiful Boy (2018), then as the young Henry V in
The King (2019), and a rebellious student in Wes Anderson’s anthology
The French Dispatch (2021). It was at that point where he was tagged by Denis Villeneuve to be his Paul Atreides in an ambitious multi-film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s
Dune. While in the desert for that he was also preparing to play another Messianic figure, this time of the 1960s artistic variety, when James Mangold tapped him to be his Bob Dylan in
A Complete Unknown.
Chalamet embodies the iconic yet still eternally mysterious legendary musician perfectly. If he were to win – and he did get the Screen Actors Guild Award over Brody last week – his Bob Dylan would join Jamie Foxx’s
Ray Charles and Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury in
Bohemian Rhapsody as musician Biopics turned to Oscar gold.
Reply to Topic
