Oscars 2024: The 10 best acting performances
Each year at the Oscars, 20 top-tier performances battle it out for the four most illustrious acting prizes in the business, but there are always favourites who emerge as awards season reaches its zenith.
The race for ‘Best Actor’, ‘Best Actress’, ‘Best Supporting Actor’, and ‘Best Supporting Actress’ begins as a wide-open field that encompasses dozens upon dozens of candidates, but by the time the Academy Awards roll around, there’s always at least one or two ironclad front-runners who emerge.
It’s as close to a guarantee as possible that Robert Downey Jr and Da’Vine Joy Randolph are destined for glory, looking at how things have panned out so far, but things have been a lot more evenly split between the leading prizes, although in both instances it’s pretty much a two-horse race.
However, imagine for a second that the Oscars suddenly decided to get stingy and offer but a solitary ‘Golden Baldie’ that covers every performance in every movie, and suddenly trying to pick a winner gets a lot more difficult.
Oscars 2024: The 10 best acting performances:
10. Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan)
Playing the archetypal ‘put-upon spouse’ in a biopic can often be an underserved and unforgiving task, especially for a filmmaker who’s never been celebrated for their fleshed-out female characters, which only serves to make Emily Blunt‘s work in Oppenheimer that much more of a revelation.
The disappointment, simmering resentment, wide-eyed confusion, and atonement present on the page could have seen a lesser performer slip into the background of a story where so many great actors are doing great things, but Blunt’s poise, facial expressions, and line delivery are exquisite from beginning to end.
She’s not interested in grandstanding or showmanship, but nobody is ever left in any doubt over Kitty’s status as an equal to her world-changing husband. The mark of a truly great performance is one that enhances the others that surround it, something that’s effortlessly true of Blunt in Oppenheimer.
9. Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos)
Mark Ruffalo has always been as reliable as they come, but very rarely is he encouraged to be so brazenly weird and outlandish as Duncan Wedderburn, to the immeasurable benefit of Poor Things as a whole.
His off-screen persona is that of a genuinely nice man, but he casts off any aspersions that he doesn’t have what it takes to get down, dirty, and debauched as an irredeemably slimy sleazeball from the second he first saunters onto the scene.
It’s a comedic performance, but once laced with an underlying malevolence and sinister aura, which is a difficult balancing act to pull off. He’s hilarious, narcissistic, anxious, and self-serving but still capable of pivoting on a dime from sheer buffoonery to being outright despicable.
8. Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers, Alexander Payne)
Giamatti has enjoyed a stellar awards season, although a recurring theme is that having Oppenheimer and The Holdovers separated by drama and comedy has allowed him to burnish his trophy cabinet with some extra gold.
Anybody who’s been watching movies for the last two decades is fully aware of his talents as one of the most dependable, consistent, and multifaceted actors in the business, something that’s on full display as classics teacher Paul Hunham, whether he’s required to behave as though he’s in a Shakespearean tragedy or a slapstick comedy.
It’s an exceedingly tricky character to bring to life and do justice to, not that it’s obvious upon watching Giamatti’s tour-de-force. A lesser actor would have stumbled over the complexities required to realise Alexander Payne’s vision, but the ‘Best Actor’ nominee makes Paul feel like somebody he was born to play.
7. Colman Domingo (Rustin, George C. Wolfe)
The fact Netflix‘s Rustin has largely been shut out of the awards season spotlight altogether has taken some of the focus away from Colman Domingo, who stands tall as the film’s only Oscar nominee, and deservedly so.
One of the minor criticisms levelled at George C. Wolfe’s biographical drama is that it could sometimes feel more like a filmed stage play than a work of cinema in the truest sense of the word, which may go some way to explaining why Domingo has been its only notable beneficiary in terms of accolades.
Rustin is technically proficient and a stirring account of a trailblazing icon, whereas Domingo is staggering in the title role. A force of nature that exudes calm, confidence, authority, warmth, and sympathy in equal measure, the actor’s personal investment in the material is apparent in every frame, and plays the intimate moments just as expertly as he does the rousing scenes in front of gathered crowds.
6. Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers, Alexander Payne)
There’s a very good reason why Da’Vine Joy Randolph has been the runaway victor of this year’s ‘Best Supporting Actress’ trail, and it’s the exact same reason why anything other than an Oscar win is going to be regarded as a monumental upset.
As Mary Lamb, Randolph paints the heart-breaking portrait of someone who lives a doomed life and continues to exist and go about her daily routine for no other reason than she feels she has to. It’s internalised to a certain extent, but when it shines through, the actor’s performance is enough to draw a tear from even the driest of eyes.
Entitlement is a recurring theme of The Holdovers, but that’s not something that applies to Mary. Beyond acting as the counterpoint to so much of what goes on, she goes toe-to-toe with Giamatti and exceeds him in terms of how strong her performance is, how it reflects the subtext of the screenplay and the way she realises it on-screen.
5. Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan)
By his own admission, Robert Downey Jr had grown too comfortable in his Marvel Cinematic Universe bubble, and following the failed Dolittle experiment, Christopher Nolan seized the opportunity to remind everyone of his generational talent.
For a decade and a half, Downey Jr had been relying almost exclusively on his tried-and-trusted persona, leaving many to doubt whether he was even capable of truly disappearing into a role or immersing himself fully into a character. That was answered, and spectacularly so, by a nuanced and layered portrayal of Oppenheimer‘s erstwhile villain.
Lewis Strauss could have comfortably been painted as a caricature going out of his way to tear down Cillian Murphy’s protagonist at any turn, but that’s why the old saying posits a hero is only as good as their villain. Downey Jr’s performance lets the audience know instantly that Strauss is two-faced and manipulative without playing that hand to the characters he shares the screen with, which is just one ingenious aspect of an all-around acting masterclass.
4. Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet)
Justine Triet’s absorbing film Anatomy of a Fall finds truths, loyalties, and allegiances constantly shifting throughout, presenting Sandra Hüller with the difficult task of maintaining a constant throughline and hold of both her character and performance from the first to the final scene.
Sandra Voyter is the anchor of a story that’s a family drama, exploration of a fracturing relationship, whodunnit, and criminal procedural all at once as the narrative progresses, requiring Hüller to both keep her guard up and plumb the depths of emotion from scene to scene.
The actor expertly navigates the highs, lows, and nuances of Sandra to drastically enhance Anatomy of a Fall and add further substance and texture to a central figure who was already compelling on the page but made even more mesmerising on-screen.
3. Emma Stone (Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos)
If they continue producing work like The Favourite and Poor Things every time they enter each other’s orbit, then Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos should keep working together as often as possible for as long as they can stand one another’s company.
Having the mind of a child transplanted into an adult’s body, Stone is required to both embrace the physicality that comes with an infant mind getting to grips with flesh-and-blood machinery it isn’t equipped to operate while also navigating a rapid emotional evolution.
Combining childlike zeal and curiosity with unbridled excitement and the bawdy, boisterous exuberance of youth, Bella Baxter’s journey through the unique world of Poor Things was tailor-made for the connection between star, director, and character, concocting a barnstorming, brilliant, and bonkers performance as a result.
2. Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan)
It would be an understatement to say there’s some pressure that comes with being the man who developed something with the potential to destroy the entire world if his calculations were off, and Cillian Murphy makes that patently clear from the offset in Oppenheimer.
Playing the lead role in biopics rooted in history-changing events has often devolved into scenery-chewing histrionics, but Murphy and Nolan’s intimate knowledge of both the script, the character, and their own shared history away from the cameras guaranteed that would never be an option on the table.
Dialling it back further than most biopics would ever dare, Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer is awkward, introverted, and somebody who doesn’t play too well with others, which he obviously needs to overcome – and ultimately atone for – after cracking the means to create the atomic bomb.
1. Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese)
Sharing the screen with both of Martin Scorsese’s muses – who happen to be among the greatest actors of their generation – could have been daunting, but Lily Gladstone blows both Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro clean off the screen and into the cheap seats.
It’s remarkable to think that Mollie Kyle was only a peripheral figure in the story before extensive rewrites bumped her up to a key part of Killers of the Flower Moon, and it would have been a significantly lesser film were Gladstone to have been relegated to a glorified bit-part.
A haunting performance in a story embedded in real-world atrocities, Gladstone signals the personal and societal pressures Mollie carries through something as simple as a glance or movement, saying more with her body language than any monologue could hope to achieve, leaving her co-stars – and the rest of the Oscars acting contenders – in the dust with a monumental performance.
