Missing in action: this season’s most overlooked movie performances

As awards season heats up, there are a number of deserving performers who haven’t been making the cut

With the most recent Oscar ceremony having taken place abnormally late in April, it feels like we barely had a break before the machinery of awards season started cranking up again. It began at the Venice film festival at the tail end of summer and is now in full cry, with major critics’ groups and more dubious collectives like the Golden Globes having already weighed in – and a gaggle of apparent frontrunners establishing themselves in major categories. In the acting fields, we’re already pondering the likelihood of victories for stars like Kristen Stewart, Benedict Cumberbatch, Will Smith and Rita Moreno – though there’s still plenty of wiggle room for surprises. Last year’s extra-long season yielded an almost entirely unforeseen nomination for Lakeith Stanfield and an against-the-odds win for Anthony Hopkins: never make the mistake of taking the pundits’ word as gospel.

Related: Golden Globes 2022 tries to do better as Lady Gaga brings the outrage

With that in mind, we’re highlighting a few outlying performances that ought to be in the mix, but haven’t yet generated the buzz they deserve. Some of them are just outside the perceived top tier of contenders, others are long shots that we can merely dream about. But there’s still a long way to go – Oscar nomination ballots only go out toward the end of January, for one thing. And the season would be more interesting for having all these names invited to the party.

Richard Ayoade, The Souvenir Part II

Two years ago, Ayoade’s brief, haughty cameo was a comic high point of The Souvenir, the first part of Joanna Hogg’s quietly momentous, autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young woman. His expanded presence in the second is one of the film’s great surprises: the character enters proceedings as a hilariously preening, self-involved filmmaker on the rise (allegedly inspired by Julien Temple) before delivering an unexpectedly bittersweet shot of wisdom in his final scene. He lost the British Independent Film award to After Love newcomer Talid Ariss, and given the first film’s failure to register with Bafta and the Academy, that might have been his best shot on goal.

Bradley Cooper, Nightmare Alley and Licorice Pizza

Bradley Cooper has been nominated for eight Oscars, four of them for acting, and has yet to win: last time, he suffered the humiliation of putting his heart, soul and real singing voice into portraying a doomed rock star in A Star is Born, only to lose to Rami Malek’s lip-synching, rubber-dentured Freddie Mercury. You’d think he’s carrying a pretty hefty IOU into this year’s race, but so far neither of his two superb, very different performances in high-profile prestige films have generated much heat. He’s unnerving as a fraudulent, tar-souled mentalist in Guillermo del Toro’s sleek noir remake, and a blast of gonzo comic energy as flamboyant producer Jon Peters in Paul Thomas Anderson’s California nostalgia piece: perhaps voters will eventually latch onto the bravura range he’s showing.

Matt Damon, Stillwater

After some gauche interview statements, Matt Damon’s popularity isn’t at a high right now, and barely anyone saw Tom McCarthy’s Amanda Knox-inspired fish-out-of-water water drama when it hit cinemas in the summer – extinguishing whatever awards hopes remained after its tepid Cannes premiere. That’s a shame, since he’s genuinely terrific in it: cast against type as a Trump-supporting Oklahoma oil worker attempting to defy the French legal system after his daughter’s murder conviction, he’s both calloused and wounded, resisting cheap political stereotyping, but not also shying from the bluster of ugly-American entitlement. He’s been nominated for far less substantial work.

Anders Danielsen Lie, The Worst Person in the World

Renate Reinsve, the luminous lead of Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s generational dramedy, has deservedly led the film’s awards charge since winning best actress at Cannes in July, and recently placed second with the LA film critics. But Danielsen Lie, who’s having a banner year between this and Bergman Island, deserves some of the hype too: as the older Gen X boyfriend of Reinsve’s restless millennial protagonist, he’s a wry anchoring presence in the film’s early stages, before stepping up to carry the film’s most devastating strand – including a punch-to-the-gut monologue confessing his fears of being erased by the future. He deserves more recognition, not that the actor – who still maintains a second career as a doctor – seems especially bothered.

Ana de Armas, No Time to Die

The latest, bleakest James Bond adventure divided popular opinion in most of the usual ways, but there was one component of the film that everyone agreed on as a highlight: Ana de Armas’ funny, thrilling, one-and-done action sequence as an inexperienced Cuban CIA agent drafted in to help the ex-007 out on a delicate Havana mission, that she then proceeds to blow up in absolutely every sense of the term. Many complained that her presence was too brief, but it’s an ideal Bond cameo: she waltzes in with all guns blazing and charisma to spare, sets everything on fire, and leaves you wanting more. Can you name a supporting actress contender this year who does more in less time to juice up her film?

Dagmara Domińczyk, The Lost Daughter

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s marvellous directorial debut is rightly racking up awards buzz for Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as different but eerily synched iterations of the same character, with the latter hoping to score in the supporting category. I hope she does, but her meatier role gives her a leg up on her fine co-stars, who also merit consideration: Dakota Johnson for one, but especially the excellent, oft-sidelined Polish American actor Domińczyk, who burns an immediate hole in proceedings as the watchful, passive-aggressive holidaymaker who first locks horns with Colman’s equally thorny tourist. Radiating volatile don’t-tread-on-me energy beneath even a polite offer of birthday cake, she lingers faintly terrifyingly in the mind long after her character recedes into the background.

Colman Domingo, Zola

The malevolent secret weapon of Janicza Bravo’s raucous, ripped-from-Twitter stripper romp, Domingo hasn’t been entirely ignored so far this season, having collected supporting nods from both the indie-oriented Gotham and Spirit awards. But it’s looking all too likely that he’ll be crowded out of the Oscar race by bigger names in slicker, softer films, and that isn’t right. As the mysterious, initially nameless Nigerian pimp who comes to hold Taylour Paige and Riley Keough’s road-tripping dancers in his ruthless grip, he’s a lightning bolt in an already sparky enterprise, code-switching with uncanny aplomb and controlling the very tone of the film on a dime.

Polly Draper, Shiva Baby

Emma Seligman’s brilliant, claustrophobic comedy of manners, errors and bagels has one of the year’s most beautifully cast, balanced and rhythmically integrated ensembles – and it’s been a shame to see that go unrecognised by voting groups who reserve ensemble awards for films cramming the most A-list names onto the screen. But if there’s any MVP in the closely matched group (and I very nearly plumped for Dianna Agron’s sweetly venomous shiksa at the all-Jewish wake), it’s Draper’s invasive, fretful, maddeningly neurotic but movingly concerned mother to Rachel Sennott’s spiralling protagonist – a walking Jewish mother joke whose punchline turns out to be her very human tenderness.

Rebecca Hall, The Night House

When this excellent, underrated psychological horror film was released in August, I wasn’t the only critic to note that Hall unassumingly gives one of the year’s best performances in it: a study in politely suppressed grief erupting as increasingly off-kilter mania. Of course, it was agreed at the time, this modest genre indie wasn’t the kind of film that would return at awards season; good thing her superb directorial debut Passing would get her some behind-the-camera gold instead. Five months later, Passing also is getting less than its due in precursor awards, and one way or another, Hall deserves better for the standout year of her career.

Gaby Hoffmann, C’mon C’mon

When I first saw C’mon C’mon, I assumed Hoffmann would be among the top tier of women to beat for all best supporting actress prizes. A well-loved child star turned valued character actor in TV and film alike, she does the best work of her career in Mike Mills’ lovely, melancholic study of parenting, guardianship and the burden of care. As the weary but enduringly patient sister of Joaquin Phoenix’s protagonist, straining under the weight of responsibilities to her son and husband alike, Hoffmann exquisitely essays the emotional exhaustion that is a symptom of the age we live in, playing her neither as sainted martyr or frazzled harridan, but something credibly in between. It’s delicate, precise work, and evidently too subtle by half – even the Spirit awards, otherwise high on Mills’ film, failed to nominate her.

Toko Miura, Drive My Car

Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s rich, finely woven three-hour adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story has emerged as the unexpected darling of critics’ award season, even uniting the rarely simpatico New York and Los Angeles critics’ groups in their best picture voting. Leading man Hidetoshi Nishijima has received some best actor attention along the way, but Miura, his most essential scene partner for the bulk of the film, has been largely ignored. As the young, taciturn chauffeur to Nishijima’s withdraw stage maestro, gradually revealing a life of inordinate tragedy in economical phrases and gestures, she’s as compelling a listener on screen as she is a speaker, and deserves her share of the glory.

Charlotte Rampling, Benedetta

It’s been a good year for Rampling, who wouldn’t be a bad shout in best supporting actress for her darkly imperious Gaius Helen Mohiam in Denis Villeneuve’s spectacular take on Dune. But that isn’t the first, nor the best, Reverend Mother figure she’s played this year: she’s a riot in Paul Verhoeven’s lurid nuns-gone-wild spectacular, playing a progressively undermined authoritarian figure who pivots from gorgon to strangely sympathetic victim almost entirely on the strength of Rampling’s austere, stricken gravitas. But she’s blissfully attuned to the high camp of the enterprise too, reeling off some of the year’s most impeccably withering one-liners: “No miracles happen in bed,” she says at one point with pitch-perfect, life-learned disdain.

Charlie Shotwell, John and the Hole

In a good year for child performances, two boys are hogging the attention: Woody Norman, the furious, capricious, heart-on-sleeve British prodigy of C’mon C’mon, and Belfast lead Jude Hill, an appealing presence tackling somewhat less complex demands. 14-year-old Shotwell, however, should be right up there with them. Having already proven himself an impressively eerie presence in The Nest, he carries Pascual Sisto’s chilling, Haneke-esque riff of Home Alone with unnerving assurance and vivid psychic pain – as a meek teenage boy trapping and imprisoning his family in order to live independently. It’s an unnerving premise, enriched by Shotwell’s refusal to play John merely as a dead-eyed boy-psycho: he’s a kid, curious and vulnerable, stretching for an epiphany that eludes him.

Dan Stevens, I’m Your Man

That Dan Stevens, erstwhile toff dreamboat of Downton Abbey, speaks German throughout Maria Schrader’s delightful sci-fi romcom is the most immediately surprising aspect of a performance that nonetheless goes on to wrong-foot and disorient us in more substantial ways. As a bespoke android boyfriend perfectly tailored for the needs of Maren Eggert’s wary career woman, he has fun luring us into the character’s robotic implacability before inviting us to question whether his sentience and emotional weak spots are themselves programmed, or a kind of human ghost in the machine. It’s one of the year’s most spry comic turns, and the high point of a career that has recently taken quirkier directions than anyone might have guessed after his TV breakout.

Mary Twala, This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection

A legend in her native South Africa, the 80-year-old Twala died in 2020, mere months after her career-crowning turn in Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s staggering Lesotho-set fable first popped at the Sundance film festival. That may add a degree of poignancy to her performance as a rural widow whose preparations to die are disrupted by a battle for her ancestral land, but it needs no sentimental context: This it’s already devastating work on its own terms, carrying a lifetime of labour and marginalisation in her gnarled but defiant bearing and expression. She stands her ground as though she’s grown roots in the earth itself.