As various nominating groups unveil their choices, these impressive turns have been largely overlooked. But there’s still time to rectify that, academy voters!
Now that the Screen Actors Guild has issued its nominations and the Golden Globes have… well, live-tweeted … this awards season’s acting races are starting to come into focus. Still, I’d like to coax adventurous Oscar voters to look elsewhere, since so many of the best performances were overlooked by both groups. Here are five stellar turns that still deserve their due, as well as a sixth performance that ought to be doing even better than it is. Here are some things Renate Reinsve does as Julie, the lead character of “The Worst Person in the World”: She switches her college major; she flirts; she dates one guy and thinks about dating another; sometimes she dances, does drugs, writes, takes pictures; she worries, more often than she should, that she is aimless. But in this collection of small things that make up a real life, the movie’s aim proves incredibly true. Reinsve,34, is a Norwegian performer but looks so much like Dakota Johnson that you’ll start wondering why Johnson doesn’t get to be in romantic dramedies that are this real and appealing, or why Hollywood has stopped making them anymore. (The film, which had a small, Oscar-qualifying release last year, will be released in more U.S. theaters next month.) Maybe that’s why I treasured this one so much, though most of that credit ought to go to Reinsve for playing somebody so specific in her unfocused sprawl that you’d think you should be able to text Julie for drinks after watching her movie. What can’t Colman Domingo make better? The 52-year-old Broadway veteran has become one of our best character actors, popping up in a host of awards-season movies like “Lincoln,” “Selma” and “If Beale Street Could Talk.” He can play sly — with his raised eyebrows and shady silences, he almost stole “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” from the rest of that film’s starry cast — or solid, as when he embodied the traditionalist opposite a fiery Chadwick Boseman in “ Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” “Zola” is less obvious as an Oscar contender than those films were, but Domingo’s performance in it still deserves attention: As a pimp who strings along our heroine ( Taylour Paige) during a strip-club road trip gone wrong, Domingo is both frightening and a live-wire hoot, sometimes toggling between those extremes in the space of a line.
