In a year of meaningful roles, who deserves an Oscar?

Whenever I see a great movie actor interviewed on a talk show or film festival panel, I am always stunned at how these seemingly ordinary mortals can somehow entirely reshape themselves when wrapped up in a role. Many actors, I suspect, are equally confounded by what they do. It’s a mystery that can’t really be explained, and perhaps is best left that way.

The Oscars air March 10 on ABC, affording a perfect opportunity to contrast the nominated actors’ red carpet chitchat with their transformative work on-screen. As is my annual custom, here is my take on some of the standout acting nominees, as well as a few of the best performances of the year that went unrecognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Best actress

Of the five nominees, Lily Gladstone, playing the beleaguered Osage wife in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” gives a soul-deep performance that is as eloquent in its silences as in its spoken passages. The catch here is that, if one goes strictly by screen time, Gladstone’s work qualifies as more of a supporting role. This is the main problem I had with the movie. There should have been much more of her. But it’s a tribute to her performance that one thinks of Gladstone as the film’s centerpiece. 

Her only real competition in this category is Emma Stone in “Poor Things,” portraying a woman who starts out with the mind of a toddler and ends as a free-living feminist. It’s quite a feat, although, like the movie itself – a steampunk cross between “Frankenstein” and “Pygmalion” – it strikes me as more of an audacious stunt than a reason to celebrate. 

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Sandra Hüller is nominated for best actress as a possibly murderous wife in “Anatomy of a Fall.”

The other three nominees – Annette Bening as the vehemently competitive long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad in “Nyad”; Carey Mulligan as Leonard Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre, in “Maestro”; and, particularly, Sandra Hüller as the novelist and suspected murderer in “Anatomy of a Fall” – are all commendable. Hüller, by the way, is equally good, in an entirely different tonal key, as the wife of the Auschwitz commandant in Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece and best picture nominee, “The Zone of Interest.” 

Among the deserving but overlooked, I would rate highly Leonie Benesch as the harried German middle school instructor in “The Teachers’ Lounge,” a nominee for best international feature. She conveys the expanding desperation of someone whose do-good efforts lead her into bad byways. Laure Calamy in “Full Time,” as a hard-pressed Parisian hotel worker, is an ardent wonder. And in A.V. Rockwell’s too-little-seen “A Thousand and One,” Teyana Taylor, in her first leading movie role, absolutely galvanizes as a mother who kidnaps her son from foster care.

Best actor

Of the five nominees, I like best Jeffrey Wright as the tetchy college professor and novelist in “American Fiction.” I have seen Wright in over two dozen movies and TV shows, and onstage. Never has he been less than terrific. Paul Giamatti, as a tetchy prep school teacher in “The Holdovers,” overdoes the Scrooge stuff early on, but then settles into someone recognizably human. (Giamatti ranks high on the All-Time-Most-Snubbed list for not having even been nominated for “Sideways.”)

Three of the best actor nominees are playing real people. In the misguided “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein is an energetic piece of mimicry. As civil rights icon Bayard Rustin in “Rustin,” Colman Domingo is better than the movie. Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in “Oppenheimer” captures the physicist’s ethereal, head-in-the-clouds side but not his dandyish, control-freak demeanor. The best unnominated performance for me is Benoît Magimel’s as the culinary connoisseur in “The Taste of Things.” Don’t watch while hungry.

Seacia Pavao/© 2023 Focus Features LLC

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, nominated for best supporting actress in “The Holdovers,” gives a master class as a grieving mom.

Best supporting actress

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, as the cafeteria manager in “The Holdovers” whose son has recently died in Vietnam, gives a master class in how to make the most of one’s screen time. Her every word, gesture, and glance contain so many dizzying emotional levels that I sometimes wished the entire movie had been about her. It’s almost preternatural the way she can combine funny and sad in the exact same moment.

Danielle Brooks is the powerhouse Sofia in “The Color Purple” – a role she first triumphantly played on Broadway. She goes from a fierce force of nature to an incarcerated woman in the pits of depression. In both embodiments, she compels our utmost attention.

Viola Davis, as Michael Jordan’s don’t-mess-with-me mother in “Air,” was typically wonderful, and should have been nominated. I also admired the unnominated Scarlett Johansson in “Asteroid City.” She plays a self-infatuated movie star, and she does so without a trace of condescension or a wink to the audience. A whiff of melancholia wafts through her performance. 

Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures

Mark Ruffalo is a best supporting actor contender for his role as a cad in “Poor Things.”

Best supporting actor

Lots of good, nominated work in this category. Sterling K. Brown’s partying plastic surgeon livens up “American Fiction” whenever he swaggers on-screen. Robert De Niro, who I imagined would be miscast as an early-20th-century Southwestern cattle baron in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is entirely believable. As Ken, Ryan Gosling is both hilarious and, of all things, touching in “Barbie.” Mark Ruffalo, as the insufferable dandy in “Poor Things,” gives one of the most obstreperously funny performances I’ve ever seen.

Best for me is Robert Downey Jr. as Atomic Energy Commission Chair Lewis Strauss, the chief nemesis in “Oppenheimer.” Downey has been so identified with the Marvel and Sherlock Holmes franchises that for many moviegoers it’s understandable his intensely focused work here would come as a revelation. (Some viewers didn’t even recognize him.) But one has only to look at his performances in everything from “Less Than Zero” and “Chaplin” to “Two Girls and a Guy” and “Wonder Boys” to recognize just how extraordinary he can be. And how versatile. Downey’s harrowing, real-life history of drug usage, which he has successfully overcome, makes him the sentimental favorite to win in this category. But sentiment needn’t play a part in tipping the scales. He deserves the honor regardless.

And finally, hats off to the unnominated John Magaro. He plays the novelist husband in Celine Song’s marvelous, best picture-nominated “Past Lives,” co-starring the also excellent Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. It’s not always easy playing a good guy. Villains are easier. Magaro portrays an essentially decent man who fears the love of his life is drifting away, and that there is nothing he can do to prevent it. You need a tremendous fund of empathy to give the kind of performance Magaro gives here.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic.