Movies 27 Actors We’d Grant Oscars
Prizes are being handed out everywhere, but these 2018 actors really rate awards-season love
Prizes are being handed out everywhere, but these 2018 actors, from Lady Gaga to Timothée Chalamet, really rate awards-season love.
Every February, actors are given shiny prizes for everything from box-office clout to critical adoration. But the actors who count — the ones who excite, provoke and illuminate the human condition we share? They’re the ones who should be basking in awards-season glory. Here are 27 performances from 2018 that deserve to be singled out, Oscar recognition be damned. They’re all pure gold in our book.
Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga A STAR IS BORN
They’re out of the shallow now — and these two supernovas walk a tightrope in A Star Is Born. In a blazing screen debut that strips away her pop-star glamour, Gaga (a.k.a. Stefani Germanotta) finds the unruly heart of a music newbie wounded by love. And Cooper, besides directing (his debut) and contributing to the script and songs, turns in the best performance of his career as a megastar flameout whose addictions are mere symptoms of a deeper personal pain. It was a risk for both of them. The reward, however, was huge.
Rami Malek BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY
Bitch all you want about the movie’s flaws — Malek’s bravura take on Queen frontman Freddie Mercury lifted Bohemian Rhapsody to box-office heights and helped make it the most successful music biopic to date. The actor replicated Mercury’s 1985 Live Aid set to an astonishing degree; more import- ant, he nailed the singer’s sexual bravado. This is what a champion looks like.
Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz THE FAVOURITE
While critics argue over who’s the lead and what constitutes a “supporting” role here, a trio of female dynamos turn this bawdy peek into 18th-century court intrigue into a showcase for acting fireworks. With the worship-worthy Colman as Queen Anne — and Stone and Weisz as women vying for her favor and jockeying for power — The Favourite makes it impossible to pick a favourite. They’re all royalty.
Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?
McCarthy shows off some serious dramatic chops as Lee Israel, a not-so-bestselling author who pays the bills by forging letters supposedly written by literary giants. And Grant, as the scheming barfly who becomes her literal partner in crime, digs into the
juiciest and most unexpectedly touching role he’s ever had the chance to feast on. Talk about a dynamic duo.
Yalitza Aparicio ROMA
She’s a preschool teacher of indigenous Mixtec heritage who had never acted before. And yet Aparicio, playing a maid to a Mexico City family in a state of domestic emergency, emerges as the healing force in Alfonso Cuarón’s haunting memory piece. The kindness and sorrow in her eyes are what anchor his free-form flashback — and the elements that make Roma impossible to forget.
Adam Driver, John David Washington BLACKKKLANSMAN
Spike Lee uses a true story of 1970s hate groups to rip into the bigotry of the Trump era. And he picked just the right actors to do it. Washington brings bruising heat and biting humor to the role of a black Colorado cop who — wait for it — infiltrates the KKK. And Driver, as his Jewish partner who serves as the white face of the sting, is disturbingly brilliant at showing the toxic residue that comes from lying down with white-supremacist dogs.
Glenn Close
There’s a special kick you get from watching an indisputably great actress tackle a part that’s worthy of her talents. And for Close, the role of a long-suffering wife who’s had enough when her cheating husband wins a Nobel Prize for literature is a chance for her to fire on all cylinders. Stunning.
BEAUTIFUL BOY THE WIFE Timothée Chalamet
Arguably the most talented young actor of his generation (votes for Lucas Hedges will also be accepted), Chalamet proves that his 2018 Oscar nod for Call Me By Your Name was no fluke. As Nic Sheff, the meth-addict son of a father (Steve Carell) who’s addicted to saving him, the 23-year-old star explores the physical and moral collapse that comes with being a junkie. There’s not an ounce of bullshit in his performance — just blunt, heartbreaking honesty.
Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali GREEN BOOK
You can believe the hype about how this double act knocks it out of the park in this 1960s road trip through a segregated America. Ali plays the elegant jazz musician touring the Jim Crow South. Mortensen is the New York bouncer on the Mob payroll who’s chauffeuring the pianist below the Mason-Dixon line. The former expertly exposes the secret heart of a closed-off artist; the latter brings a piercing intelligence to portraying a racist hothead who has his eyes opened to the era’s inequities.
Elsie Fisher EIGHTH GRADE
What’s it like to be 13 in a digital age where worth is measured in likes, shares and retweets? It’s all there in Fisher’s agonizingly funny, touching take on Kayla, a kid courting popularity from peers and caught in the horror we call “middle school.” In her breakout performance, the then-14-year-old actress expertly personifies filmmaker Bo Burnham’s notion that the rattling insecurity of eighth grade is a state of mind some of us only pretend we’ve moved past.
Regina King IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK
In Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s seminal 1974 novel of Harlem life, racism and young love, King plays Sharon, a mother who’s not going to sit back and watch her daughter become a prison widow. Her future sonin-law has been framed for a rape he did not commit. And as this righteous matriarch labors to push aside mountains of social injustice, King builds a transformative, transcendent performance that turns this ordinary woman into the living embodiment of maternal love and grace under pressure.
Ethan Hawke FIRST REFORMED
As a parish pastor suffering a crisis of faith, Hawke restores our belief in acting as a true art form. Filmmaker Paul Schrader drops this man of God into a pitched battle between the flesh and the spirit, his duty to God, and his responsibility as a human being in 2018. Hitting a new career peak, Hawke shows us a soul in torment. It’s a performance that we’ll be talking about for years to come.
Toni Collette HEREDITARY
How does this magnificent Australian actress not have an Oscar yet? In Ari Aster’s tale of poisoned bloodlines, Collette plays a wife and mother whose outward devotion to family may be hiding something sinister. Is it supernatural? Or a malignant force passed along for generations? The question nags at you as she captures every twist in a psychological thriller that will keep you up nights. Clockwise from top left: Aparicio in Roma; Driver and Washington in BlacKkKlansman; Ali and Mortensen in Green Book; Hawke in First Reformed;
Fisher in Eighth Grade. Dafoe doesn’t so much play the tortured painter Vincent van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s visceral rendering of the life of an artist; he crawls into the man’s skin and takes us inside the post-Impressionist’s head. We see what van Gogh sees — and Dafoe seems lit from within with the exhilarating madness of creation. His portrayal, like the film, is spellbinding.
VOX LUX Willem Dafoe AT ETERNITY’S GATE Natalie Portman
As Celeste, a rock star whose music grows out of a childhood trauma relating to a school shooting, Portman swings for the fences. Even her Black Swan role — in which she gave us a ballerina in psychological-meltdown mode — won’t prepare you for how she tears it up as a diva determined to obliterate her pain with booze, drugs and primal-scream performance that reflects an equally self-destructive world.
Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan BLACK PANTHER
Did the blockbuster success of this Marvel masterpiece blind some muckety-muck tastemakers to the spectacular one-two punch of Boseman as the crime-fighting African king/Wakandan superhero and Jordan as the villain hellbent on bringing him down? Both of them elevated this comic-book movie to the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Wakanda forever!
Steven Yeun BURNING
Those who knew Yeun only as the kindly Glenn on The Walking Dead will be blown away by what he does in this Korean art film from director Lee Chang-dong ( Secret Sunshine) about a love triangle that ends in murder. He’s revelatory as a charming/ chilling playboy with a yen for seeing everything around him go up in flames.
Regina Hall SUPPORT THE GIRLS
Very few folks showed up to see this indie about a bad day in the life of the manager of a Hooters-type joint whose life is stuck in second gear. Hall, of seemingly limitless comic and dramatic resources, plays this mother hen with such empathy for the sisters in her charge that she won the best-actress prize from the New York Film Critics Circle. Attention must be paid.
Christian Bale, Amy Adams VICE
Bale bulked up by 45 pounds to play Dick Cheney, the former vice president who created his own stealth government under George W. Bush. But impersonation is only the chameleonic actor’s first step into getting inside the political chess player’s head. Likewise, Adams bores into what makes Lynne Cheney a controlling influence on her husband. Humanizing the power couple doesn’t undercut their power plays; it makes them scarier. And if satire means using humor to criticize people’s vices, then Bale and Adams prove themselves masters of the game.