The art of acting: award season’s most astonishing screen turns

Every year, usually beginning sometime in September and extending through the holiday deluge, there emerge a series of screen performances so showy and impressive, so conspicuous in their conjoined displays of craft and ambition, that there is nothing to be done with them but to bestow nominations and prizes.

This is not necessarily a compliment. When Pauline Kael snarked that Gena Rowlands’ acting in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) was enough for a “whole row of Oscars”, she was, as was occasionally the case, barking up the wrong tree. Rowlands was actually too good for the Academy, losing to (the excellent) Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Still, Kael’s review conveys a relatable and perennial impatience with the sort of acting typically associated with acceptance speeches.

The past year’s prospective and actual honorees includes a bumper crop of tours de force, of performances that cry out – sometimes literally – for our consideration. And the nominees are: playing a mother grieving her dead son in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley illustrates the observation in Maggie O’Farrell’s source novel that “there are many different ways to cry” so vividly that you want to hook her up to a saline drip. As the title character of Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet channels his own try-hard ethos so that every line delivery feels like part of a highlight reel. Sean Penn’s vein-popping mania as a General Jack D. Ripper type catapults One Battle After Another into cartoon-Kubrick territory. The best joke in the ostensibly satirical Sentimental Value, that the wannabe-Oscar-winning actress played by Elle Fanning is promoting a prestige picture that “opens in the fall”, belies the degree to which the cast’s performances are calibrated for awards-season recognition; it’s a major plot point that Fanning and Renate Reinsve’s characters are both striving to do justice to roles defined by their juiciness.

Same as it ever was: the reason some commentators so often question, or ridicule, the idea that the Oscars (or the Baftas, or the Césars) are useful measuring sticks for quality, in acting or any other aspect of filmmaking, is precisely because that idea carries so much weight with audiences and performers – especially, it seems, the latter. Insofar as the tension between art and commerce inherent in mainstream moviemaking has fostered different criteria for success – pitting the populist metric of box-office receipts against the more ephemeral currency of critical plaudits – actors have historically tended to gravitate more towards acclaim than earning power. “I’d rather be known as a great actress than a movie star,” said Diane Selwyn – herself a woman under the influence – in Mulholland Dr. (2001), a part for which Naomi Watts, who is both, was somehow not nominated. For every movie star who desperately wants to be a thespian, there’s a bigger one who’s happier mocking the prospect, like Arnold Schwarzenegger doing Hamlet via his fictional, Ah-nold-on-steroids proxy Jack Slater in Last Action Hero (1993) (“To be or not to be? Not to be” – cue explosion). Meanwhile, the most gifted actors crave the approbation of their peers. Validation is a hell of a drug. “You like me. Right now, you like me,” blurted out Sally Field at the Oscars in 1985, dispensing with anything like subtext. “Awards are like applause,” Ralph Fiennes was quoted as saying in 2024 while flogging Conclave. “And actors love applause.”

That Fiennes lost the 2024 Best Actor Oscar to Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer will ultimately be a footnote to history. For the time being, his status as arguably the greatest living British actor (or just living actor, period) to be passed over for Ampas recognition remains intact. Sadly, the most ovation-worthy recent Fiennes performance had no chance of getting him anywhere near the podium. His appearance in 28 Years Later as the benign, iodine-stained plague survivor/ossuary architect Dr Ian Kelson imbues Danny Boyle’s film with a raggedy pathos; playing a man whose unexpectedly extended lease on life has given him a healthy respect for death, the actor locates and proceeds from a core of mournful decency. Kelson’s inner light radiates outwards, first through Fiennes’s broken but unbowed body language, and then in a series of marvellous line readings suggesting a mellifluous professional voice muted by disuse: bedside manner in need of a patient.

In both 28 Years Later and its equally fine sequel The Bone Temple, Fiennes manages something unusual for a long-serving master actor: he surprises us. That quality is partly due to certain specifics of the role itself; Dr Kelson’s extended, leather-clad pantomime of Iron Maiden’s ‘Number of the Beast’ in The Bone Temple – described by director Nia DaCosta as an amalgam of Japanese butoh dancing and the ‘Lip-Sync For Your Life’ segment of RuPaul’s Drag Race [2009-] – manifests as a strange but plausible explosion of the character’s combustible, repressed energies. It’s a cliché to say that an actor disappears into a role, or that they play against type, and neither of those things are exactly true here; Fiennes’s casting as an initially ambiguous, Colonel Kurtz-like figure plays off his repertoire of madmen and iconoclasts, and he’s done the dancing-fool bit already, too, in the moves-like-Jagger set piece in A Bigger Splash (2015). Better to say, then, that Fiennes is unleashed by Boyle and DaCosta’s neo-B movie mandate. Plying his trade at a safe distance from respectability or institutional recognition, he’s free to do some of the greatest work of his career. 

There’s something about lip-syncing pop songs that can reveal unexpected depths in even the most eccentric of actors. Rocking out can be a skeleton key, unlocking reserves of hidden charisma. For instance: try reconciling Dean Stockwell’s fresh-faced angst as Edmund Tyrone in Sidney Lumet’s version of Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) with his performance of ‘In Dreams’ in Blue Velvet (1986), clutching a klieg light like a rosary and collapsing the gap between Roy Orbison and Andy Warhol. Or: think of Tom Cruise in Risky Business (1983) and The Color of Money (1986), boogieing to Bob Seger in the one, making sure his hair is perfect in sync with Warren Zevon in the other. A case could be made that Emma Stone’s Oscar for La La Land (2016) was cinched by her brief, sarcastic vamp to A Flock of Seagulls’ ‘I Ran’, deployed as part of a gender-flipped homage to Singin’ in the Rain (1952), in which Ryan Gosling’s ‘serious musician’, moonlighting as the keytarist in a cheesy cover band, gets hoist on his own pretentious petard.

Stone does even better with a similar shtick in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, when we see her pharmaceutical mogul Michelle Forbes piloting an SUV to the strains of Chappell Roan’s catchy kiss-off ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ It’s the perfect anthem for a savvy, media-conscious girlboss, made uncanny by the fact that Stone only pantomimes the back-up vocals – a hilarious touch which suggests something simultaneously precise and askew about the character. The enigma of somebody performatively curating their own solo-carpool karaoke connects with the larger mystery of whether Forbes is an alien in human form.

At this point, it may seem silly to be surprised by Stone, an endlessly game comic actress whose greatest gift is her total lack of vanity – exemplified in Bugonia by her willingness to play the majority of her scenes with a buzz cut and slathered in antihistamine cream (she and Dr Kelson could exchange skincare tips). But she’s such an instinctive, inventive performer that she can take even peripheral parts and make them mesmerising. Consider that in Stone’s other major role last year, in Ari Aster’s underrated (and largely misunderstood) political satire Eddington, she played a character as thoroughly brainwormed as the one acted by Jesse Plemons in Bugonia. Not only does Stone transform herself into a dead ringer for Sissy Spacek circa Badlands (1973), but she keeps finding ways to define the character of Louise Cross by her eyeline; after spending so many scenes turned furtively away from her doting but frustrated husband Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) – or stealing disappointed glances as he talks to other people around them – she finally meets his gaze from the mediated remove of a video playing on a laptop screen, smiling sweetly as if on some level she suspects her now-ex is somewhere out there watching. 

Cross’s grateful indoctrination into a cult of personality at the end of Eddington provides Aster’s parable of psychological pliability with its acidic punchline; her glazed expression finds a mirror in another one of last year’s great (and shamefully unnominated) performances, by Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee. Her work in Mona Fastvold’s film as the 18th-century Christian restorationist, who communes with her followers through group renditions of traditional Quaker hymns, is not a case of less is more, but rather an object lesson in mapping and realising an over-the-top trajectory. Ann Lee is a siren caught up in her own hypnotic thrall; the surprise isn’t that Seyfried can sing in the role (she’s been in musicals including Mamma Mia!, 2008, and Les Miserables, 2012) but that her gravity-defying vocals actually serve to ground Fastvold’s flights of historical and stylistic fancy. The structuring ambiguity of Fastvold’s film is whether Ann’s ascent from a humble true believer into a religious figurehead reflects selflessness, solipsism or something in between; she’s born for the spotlight even if she’s seemingly too gracious to admit it.

At its core, The Testament of Ann Lee is about the relationship between devotion and showmanship – an all-American theme that places it in conversation with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Certainly, it’d be fun to watch a West Side Story-style production number pitting Lee’s Shakers against the Irish jig-dancing vampires commanded by Jack O’Connell’s Remmick in Sinners, dual constituencies in search of transcendence. Performance-wise, though, Ryan Coogler’s film is dominated by the great Delroy Lindo, an icon whose excellence is predictable even as he somehow makes everything he does seem spontaneous.

Lindo doesn’t so much act in Sinners as preside over its ensemble, as if by right of stature and talent. He more or less commandeers the film during a car ride sequence during which his character, a veteran bluesman named Delta Slim, reminisces about the lynching of a fellow musician. It’s a harrowing monologue, but Lindo – who’s capable of arias of angst, as in his astonishing performance in Spike Lee’s Da Five Bloods (2020) – underplays it. Though secured in the passenger seat of a PG Automobile, Lindo renders Slim’s grief full-bodied, fusing it to an innate and graceful musicality. Whether out of restraint or simple respect for the dead, Slim cuts his own horror story short, and begins pounding his knees in time to some remembered rhythm: the beat goes on. When the old man suddenly cries out from behind closed eyes – an ecstatic, uninhibited yelp of “Hey!” – it’s a guttural, gravel-voiced grace note; despair transubstantiated into defiance.

That the scene in question was reportedly largely improvised is a testament to Lindo’s methods of preparation and his immersion in the blues; that it was nearly cut from the film – and reinstated by Coogler at the actor’s behest – is a reminder that even the most protean performers are ultimately at the mercy of their directors and editors. “Making one’s peace with it is not the same as accepting it and being happy with it,” Lindo told the Los Angeles Times recently when asked how he’s able to reconcile such uncertainties. “It’s just the way it is; it’s a fact of life.”

That sentiment also sums up the inescapable influence and impact that awards have on the perception – and, eventually, the canonisation – of performances. The paradox is that it’s at once essential not to take such things at all seriously and completely pleasurable to be elated when a personal favourite ascends the stage. No less than Fiennes, Lindo is an all-timer, and while he doesn’t need an Oscar to prove it, a little applause never hurt anybody.