Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium’s artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself.
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The history of acting nominations at the Academy Awards is a varied collection of iconic, solid, flat-out poor, and forgettable performances. An Oscar win, let alone a nomination, doesn’t automatically signal that a performance will stand the test of time. If anything, the Academy is often behind the current cultural landscape. While we’ve discussed the most notorious acting winners in nearly 100 years of the Academy Awards, there’s another discussion about the crop of completely forgotten nominees who didn’t win. From head-scratching turns by legendary actors to nominations suggesting that voters didn’t watch the movie, these 10 Oscar-nominated performances have been memory-holed in the public consciousness, and that’s probably for the better.
The Academy loves honoring a brief, sometimes one-scene, performance—take, for example, **Beatrice Straight **in ***Network ***or **Ben Johnson **in The Last Picture Show. They recognize the unique power of a performance with roughly 10 minutes of screen time that looms over the entire movie. One of the shortest nominees in this niche category, Holly Hunter’s six-minute performance as an aide in the **John Grisham **legal thriller, The Firm, was a curious Best Supporting Actress nod that defied standard Oscar logic, as it lacks the explosiveness or emotional thrust of other brief supporting turns.
Not only was Hunter nominated for such a minor part in The Firm’s stacked cast, which included Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, and Ed Harris, but she also accomplished the rare feat of receiving two nominations in the same year, with her other nod being for The Piano, which she won Best Actress for. In the film, directed by Sydney Pollack, Hunter plays Tammy Hemphill, a fast-talking Southern legal assistant who helps Mitch McDeere (Cruise) uncover a sinister secret about his firm. Her fiery and gregarious performance in *The Firm *is totally solid, an unsurprising conclusion given Hunter’s exceptional talents. However, it’s ultimately a one-note and marginal bit part with little narrative or dramatic weight. Innate charm can go a long way in winning over voters.
It may come as a pleasant surprise that the beloved character actor **Rip Torn **indeed has an Oscar nomination to his name. However, if you gave an average cinephile a hundred guesses to name what movie earned him his lone nomination, they would never utter the name of this 1983 biographical drama, Cross Creek. From absurdist comedies like ***Dodgeball ***and ***Freddy Got Fingered ***to inspired dramatic turns in ***The Insider ***and Marie Antoinette, Torn is an impactful screen presence. Still, it’s hard to argue that his Best Supporting Actor-nominated performance in this biopic about author **Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings **belongs in any pantheon.
Starring **Mary Steenburgen **and directed by Hud’s Martin Ritt, *Cross Creek *follows Rawlings, novelist of The Yearling, who moves to Florida to focus and find inspiration for a great book. Down South, Rawlings interacts with many of the locals, notably Marsh Turner (Torn), whose run-ins with the law become the inspiration for The Yearling. The 1980s were a peculiar era for the Academy, as the separation between popular favorites and critical darlings was at an all-time high. As a result, many Oscar-nominated movies have slipped through the cracks. *Cross Creek *is no different, as the film is a rudimentary display of milquetoast Oscar fare that seemed to get obligatory nominations. Torn brings a different style of charm and grace that he would later shed as a gruff, darkly comic character actor, but the performance is forgettable and a cheap excuse to set up the film’s denouement.
One year after winning an Academy Award for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the Oscars doubled down on Penélope Cruz, the acclaimed Spanish actor who had fully crossed over as a star in America. The Academy is clearly fond of Cruz, who has also been nominated for her work with Pedro Almodóvar, including ***Volver ***and Parallel Mothers. It’s hard to quibble with any of her nominations, but the fact that we have to remind you that she not only starred in Rob Marshall’s Nine, but also was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, tells you that this was a needless honor.
Nine, based on the stage musical of the same name, which itself is based on Federico Fellini’s 8½, is best known for being one of Daniel Day-Lewis’ rare late-period screen performances. Playing a disillusioned director in a movie musical was something the ultimate method, chameleon actor couldn’t pull off, and the film in general is a whiff. Even with its impressive cast and solid performances, *Nine *lacks any propulsive direction or showstopping musical numbers. Cruz plays Carla, the mistress of Day-Lewis’ character. Providing the role with her usual streak of seductive radiance, she is undoubtedly alluring, but she can play this kind of role in her sleep. Still, Cruz has been far more daring and engaging in other, stronger movies. The nomination suggests that the Academy was going to automatically reward this performance with a nod due to its dramatic potential.
Upon release in 2021, ***Being the Ricardos ***was met with a collective shrug, if not an outright rejection. The film, about the relationship between celebrity couple **Lucille Ball **and Desi Arnaz, was a further confirmation that **Aaron Sorkin **needs to let others direct his scripts. Believe it or not, though, *Being the Ricardos *somehow earned three Oscar nominations, all for acting. At least **Nicole Kidman **and **Javier Bardem **were nominated for playing acting icons, while J.K. Simmons’ nod for Best Supporting Actor remains baffling.
Everyone agrees that Simmons gave the performance of a lifetime in Whiplash, and his Oscar was one of the most deserved wins in recent history. His work as William Frawley, Ball and Arnaz’s co-star on I Love Lucy, was the opposite—a forgettable turn hindered by Sorkin’s theatrical writing and contrived narrative dynamics. No one feels like a person in Being the Ricardos, and Simmons is more or less on autopilot as he’s used as a vessel to dissect the complex marriage and professional bond between Ball and Arnaz. From his relatively minimal impact on the final product to his dramatically inert scenes with Kidman and Bardem, this nomination was just a waste, and there are at least 10 other Simmons performances worth nominating instead. It’s a shame that some other exceptional performance this year got bumped in favor of a mind-boggling third acting nod for Being the Ricardos.
The #OscarsSoWhite movement began following the Academy Awards celebrating the films of 2015, but it first kicked into gear the prior year, which featured 20 white actors nominated across its four acting categories. Robert Duvall’s laughable nomination in The Judge, the Robert Downey Jr-led legal drama and failed Oscar bait, speaks to a stodgy voting body honoring the same crop of old-timers that needed a radical transformation. The late Duvall is an undisputed legend, but most people wouldn’t believe you if you told them he was nominated for this forgotten film.
Voters appeared to have penciled him in on their ballots before watching the movie.
Amid his tenure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Iron Man, RDJ, before Oppenheimer, tried to win himself a statuette with The Judge, a **David Dobkin **prestige drama about a troubled father-son relationship that seemed manufactured to win Oscars. In the end, **The Judge proved to be just a hackneyed, staid, and tonally imbalanced film dressing up as a serious Oscar heavyweight. Duvall, playing Downey Jr.’s father, who is on trial for a hit-and-run, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for a role that was way beneath his stature. Voters appeared to have penciled him in on their ballots before watching the movie. Filled to the brim with tired tropes and lackluster characterization, the film does no favors to Duvall and his performance as Joseph Palmer. Between The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Tender Mercies, his nod for The Judge, the last of his career, sticks out like a sore thumb.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
The early 2010s was a dominant period for Jennifer Lawrence, who received a staggering four Oscar nominations before turning 27. Since then, as she’s moved into a new stage of her career and become more selective about which projects she takes, awards buzz has waned, with her last nomination being one most people likely forget even existed as a movie. Along with Lawrence, **David O. Russell **was an Oscars darling throughout the early 2010s, but his last collaboration with the ***Silver Linings Playbook ***Oscar winner, Joy, was quickly disregarded. Still, that didn’t stop Lawrence from earning yet another nomination.
In Joy, Lawrence, nominated for Best Actress in 2015, plays the titular founder and matriarch of a family business dynasty. While met with mixed reviews, its lead star, who was arguably the face of Hollywood at the time, received what appeared like an obligatory Oscar nod. Lawrence’s work in Joy, her third collaboration with Russell, pales in comparison to her star-making turn in *Silver Linings *and the divisive supporting role in American Hustle. There’s a lack of energy and infectious charm that made her so special in this era. Thiis performance feels way too controlled and rehearsed, and it is a watered-down rehash of her previous work. The general lukewarm response to *Joy *and Lawrence’s unenthusiastic nomination proved that she needed to let loose and push new boundaries, something she has successfully done as a force of comedic nature in ***No Hard Feelings ***and shocking vulnerability in Die My Love.
The Oscars were so desperate to finally give **Al Pacino **an Oscar that they somehow nominated him for a performance as unhinged as Big Boy Caprice, the villain in Dick Tracy, Warren Beatty’s strange but beautifully stylized adaptation of the classic comic strip. As over-the-top and outlandish as Pacino’s performance is in Dick Tracy, it’s hard to argue that it’s any less cartoonish than his eventual Oscar-winning performance in Scent of a Woman. Being such an odd candidate for Oscar consideration and its place in history before the start of Pacino’s comeback in the ’90s, this nomination is unsurprisingly lost to time.
At the Academy Awards celebrating the films of 1990, *Dick Tracy *received a worthy nod for Best Makeup, but perhaps it should’ve received an additional nod for the crew’s work done on Pacino, whose garish prosthetics do all the heavy lifting in this performance. Even for Pacino, who is notorious for hamming it up, Big Boy Caprice is one of the legend’s most outrageous roles. Despite its transfixing aura, his work in *Dick Tracy *is all flash, and the sensationalism shouldn’t have been enough to grant him a Best Supporting Actor nod. Before Glengarry Glen Ross, Carlito’s Way, and Heat, Pacino couldn’t modulate his bombastic screen persona with gravitas and dramatic sincerity, making his performance in *Dick Tracy *a sheer farce that did not warrant any Oscar buzz. If anything, it should’ve been **Madonna **who came out of *Dick Tracy *with the most heat from the Academy.
When asked who the best living actors are without an Oscar nomination to their name, many would be inclined to suggest **Stanley Tucci **as a gut response. A tremendous screen performer and a marvelous celebrity icon, Tucci would probably prefer that you think he is without any love from the Academy, as his own response to his own work in ***The Lovely Bones ***at the Academy Awards ceremony tells you everything. Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the popular book of the same name was a grave misfire, and at the center of this misbegotten fantasy drama is Tucci’s mystifying performance as serial killer George Harvey.
The 1970s belonged to New Hollywood—the movie brats and anti-establishment filmmakers who broke all the rules. This cultural takeover was surprisingly reflected by the Academy throughout the decade, though remnants of Old Hollywood occasionally snuck in with the rebels. Look no further than the baffling career achievement nomination for Fred Astaire, nominated alongside winner Robert De Niro in The Godfather: Part II, in the famous disaster movie, The Towering Inferno, which we’re still trying to break down today.
Astaire is a totemic figure in Hollywood and one of the art form’s most talented performers, but the Oscars never gave him their due. Shockingly, his only competitive Oscar nomination came at the tail end of his career playing against type. The Irwin Allen-produced disaster movies were all the rage in the ’70s, but they’ve become drastically lost to time. The Towering Inferno, stuffed with a cast of A-tier movie stars and loaded with spectacle, represented the subgenre’s peak. Between Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, and William Holden, it was Astaire who came out with a nomination. Voters were obviously transfixed by the song-and-dance man’s presence in this nonmusical film about life-or-death stakes. Beyond the novelty of the casting, there’s not much to this brief performance that warrants a nod. Playing a flirtatious con artist, Astaire does his best to subvert his glamorous charm, and while he has moments of alluring magic, his performance distracts from the greater scope of the story. More so, it’s frankly an insult that the Academy never bothered to nominate Astaire for his truly exceptional work in ***Swing Time ***or The Band Wagon.
With a whopping 21 acting nominations to her name, **Meryl Streep **practically has a residency at the Academy. There was a stretch of time from the late ’80s through the early 2010s when Streep was ostensibly guaranteed a nomination if she appeared on-screen. While she’s been in a handful of great movies and given more earth-shattering performances than we can count, some of her nominations suggest that viewers didn’t watch her respective movies, but rather placed her on a ballot due to name recognition. Streep’s nomination for the incredibly mediocre and forgettable ***Florence Foster Jenkins ***should’ve been a telltale sign that voters were slacking.
Out of 21 nominations, not all are going to be classics, but Streep’s Best Actress nod for Florence Foster Jenkins, based on the true story of a New York socialite with notoriously poor singing chops, has more or less vanished into obscurity. The film, directed by **Stephen Frears **and co-starring Hugh Grant, is unworthy of being an Oscar-nominated movie. While it’s not objectively terrible, *Florence Foster Jenkins *is so resigned to being average that it insults the viewers’ tastes even more, and it proved that Academy voters can be tricked into thinking something is prestigious based on its historical backdrop. Streep is always engaging to watch, but critically speaking, this is not her finest hour, as she relies on her usual tricks of mastering tricky accents and dramatic conviction. Although these roles have suited her well in the past, the results are ultimately uninspired. By having so many undeserved nods to her name, the Academy lost sight of what makes Streep such a gifted talent.
