who will hold the golden statue?

Denzel won’t get an Oscar nomination, but here are more films and actors that deserve recognition

AS AWARDS season rounds the bend into the final Oscar showdown, some clear front-runners have emerged as the Academy Award nominations were announced this week.

But as you cheer your favourites, spare a thought for those movies, performances and technical achievements that – due to the vagaries of the calendar, genre snobbery, poor marketing or bad luck, though eminently deserving, are so forgotten or overlooked they don’t even qualify as being snubbed.

Supporting actor: I had hoped the actor’s branch would remember

Paddington 2, and Hugh Grant’s virtuosic portrayal of not just the pompous actor Phoenix Buchanan, but also of Hamlet, Macbeth, Hercule Poirot, a fetching nun, an extravagantly bearded chancer and, finally, a giddily convincing songand-dance man.

Supporting actress: This humble kibitzer would have included Sissy Spacek, whose quietly wise, wryly funny performance opposite Robert Redford in The Old Man and the

Gun leavened the film and elevated Redford’s crafty but remote character into someone we could care about.

Lead actor: How cool would it be if Denzel Washington was nominated for Equalizer 2, a movie that could have been just another slick urban thriller, but for his masterful, subtle turn as a supercompetent vigilante? The same could be said for the always-game Tom Cruise in the excellent Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

Action movies are unfairly dismissed when it comes to awards; Washington and Cruise are so good in these we take their commitment and discipline for granted.

Lead actress: Glenn or Gaga? That will be the question when it comes to the best actress race. And surely Olivia Colman stands a chance for her tetchy, needy, grief-stricken, hungry, compulsively libidinous depiction of Queen Anne in The Favourite,a sumptuous, subversively edgy period piece that’s prime Oscar fodder.

Director: Alfonso Cuarón is no doubt jotting down the names of people he wants to thank, and why not? His movie, Roma, was the finest of the year and he qualifies as the best living filmmaker on the planet (I’ll stand on Steven Spielberg’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that). His co-nominees should have included Bradley Cooper (A Star

Is Born) and Barry Jenkins (If Beale

Street Could Talk).

Best picture: Most handicappers still have this as a three-way toss-up between A Star Is Born, Roma and Green

Book. There are at least two scrappy underdogs many of us were rooting for, the winning coming-of-age tale

Eighth Grade and Paul Schrader’s chilling portrait of spiritual crisis, First

Reformed.

So what’s missing from this picture? Only a movie that, on paper, was supposed to be at the top of the list from the get-go.

First Man, Damien Chazelle’s spellbinding, boldly subjective portrait of astronaut Neil

Armstrong – played in a taciturn but emotionally affecting performance by Ryan Gosling – is an exercise in craftsmanship and feeling that used to be guaranteed lots of nominations, not to mention the endorsement of audience popularity.

Instead, this story of the physical hardship and psychic sacrifice of heroism never attracted a large viewership. Some attribute that to a fake controversy surrounding the planting of the American flag and bad-faith accusations the film wasn’t patriotic enough; others to a botched distribution strategy.

Either way, First Man deserved better. And it deserves to be a contender.

RACHEL McAdams gave a physical and effervescent performance in Game Night, but the Academy tends to overlook mainstream comedy.

DENZEL Washington and his son John David Washington should have been up for best actor.