9 unlikely Oscar nominations we’d love to see tomorrow

Early tomorrow morning, the nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards will be announced. By this point in the typically endless awards season, we all have a pretty good sense of who should expect to hear their names; if all goes as expected, a lot of people involved with and are going to have a very good day. Of course, there are always surprises, and it’s those that get us up at the ass-crack of dawn, hoping against hope for a favorite to slip into the race. These are the two thoughts that we hold in our heads come this time every year: The Oscars are silly, and no true barometer of cinematic quality; and it’s still nice to see the art and artists you love get some attention, if only for how it might boost a career.To that end, let’s highlight some long shots we’re crossing our fingers and holding out hope for in nine of the major Academy Award categories. Note that in making our selections, we tried to highlight films, actors, directors, and writers who haven’t been heavily cited as likely nominees, but also ones that aren’t so outrageously unlikely that they could never happen. (Okay, we did kind of go for one of those. Prove us wrong, directors’ branch!) Check back here early tomorrow morning for the full list of nominees, which will hopefully include at least one curveball of good taste to keep us glued to our screen next year and beyond, our faith in happy surprises rewarded.

There are quite a few worthy underdogs we could cite in the race for Supporting Actor (as usual, the list of frontrunners is much shorter than the list of great performances the Academy will likely ignore), but the worthiest may be Colman Domingo as X, the code-switching pimp Taylour Paige’s future viral star finds herself sharing a car ride and a hellish weekend with in Zola. In a general sense, Domingo has to be considered among the best supporting actors of the last decade— who’s quietly punched up the margins of such Academy-approved fare as , , and . With Zola, he secured a juicy, electrifying villain role, and absolutely nailed it, gradually revealing how his character’s easygoing charm—the mirage of a chillaxed road buddy—is its own kind of performance, turned on or off like a light switch. Domingo’s menacing, riveting performance mirrors the whole arc of Zola: a fun ride that turns dangerous on a dime.

Speaking of actors named Colman: Olivia is considered a shoo-in for a Best Actress nod—and maybe the favorite to win the Oscar—thanks to her fascinatingly prickly, motivationally mysterious performance in The Lost Daughter. We’d love to see her nominated, but would be equally pleased if her co-star, Jessie Buckley, made the cut in the Supporting Actress category for playing a younger version of the same unknowable character. Buckley, who really should have been up last year for her shape-shifting work in , doesn’t much resemble Colman, physically. But there’s plenty of emotional continuity between the two performances, and the younger star pulls off the tricky task of filling in some of the character’s psychology without completely demystifying it. Through her flashback scenes, we understand both the pain and the liberating relief of Leda’s decisions, and how they’ve shaped her life in the present. In that respect, it’s the definition of a superb supporting performance, creating crucial context for everything Colman is doing at the center of this haunting movie.

As per tradition, the Academy has whittled down the full list of submissions for this year’s foreign-language Oscar to just 15 titles, which will be pruned further to a final lineup of five. It’s hard to quibble with likely nominees like or , but we’re crossing our fingers for a dark horse from the shortlist to join them at the starting line: the German sci-fi comedy I’m Your Man, about a pragmatic researcher (Maren Eggert) who agrees to spend a few weeks field-testing the prototype of a robotic lover (Dan Stevens) programmed to her exact romantic preferences. Forgoing a broad treatment of that high concept, director Maria Schrader mines it for a surprising breadth of insight into desire, relationships, and how technology complicates both. It’s the kind of unsung gem that could benefit from some Oscar attention tomorrow—a smart charmer that deserves a bigger audience than the one it found last autumn.

The Academy’s probably too prudish to make room for Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven’s satirical but surprisingly sincere take on the true story of a 17th-century nun famous for both her holy visions and her lesbian sex life. But if nothing else, this kinky drama deserves attention for its script: Working from a nonfiction book on the real Benedetta Carlini, Verhoeven and his cowriter, David Birke, bring several provocative themes to the surface, walking a tightrope between reverence and irreverence. This is a movie that condemns the hypocrisy of the church without dismissing faith outright, remaining coy about whether Benedetta is a true or false prophet. As in his earlier , the filmmaker twists a straightforward text to his own subversive aims. The Oscars should celebrate nervy acts of adaptation like this more often.

In a perfect world, Asghar Farhadi’s drama about reputation, nobility, and the fickle nature of internet valorization would be competing in several major Oscar categories, including Best Picture. We’d settle, though, for the Academy recognizing its devastating, dizzyingly complex script as one of the year’s finest. A Hero looks, at first, like a simple moral parable about an imprisoned calligrapher (Amir Jadidi) trying to find a way to pay off the debt that landed him behind bars. But the story steadily accrues narrative and philosophical intricacy as the Iranian writer-director piles one complication on top of another. A decade ago, Farhadi overcame any bias against subtitles to land a nomination in this category for . Here’s hoping he repeats the feat and scores another nod for his best film since that masterpiece.

It’s the longest of long shots: a coveted Best Director nomination for a Thai filmmaker whose work has always lived on the border between narrative and experimental cinema (just as his characters exist on the border between the world of the living and the spirit world). And though Memoria is superficially more mainstream than Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul’s previous work—mostly by virtue of starring Tilda Swinton—it’s proven rather difficult for people to actually see, thanks to Neon’s decision to release the film in one theater in one city at a time for a small number of days, COVID be damned. All that being said, the directors’ branch of the Academy has a surprisingly adventurous track record, and recent nominations for and prove that they’re sometimes willing to look beyond the boundaries of Hollywood cinema. So we’re just going to just keep living on a prayer and pulling for Joe, whose use of precise composition and especially sound design to suggest a world (or a just a mind) sliding off its axis into the unknown counted as the most remarkable, uncanny directing of the year.

Adult-film actor. MTV personality. Sitcom player. Scary Movie star. Oscar nominee? The Academy loves a comeback and it loves a Cinderella story. Simon Rex achieved both in 2021 with his gut-bustingly funny performance in Sean Baker’s . As Mikey Saber, a washed-up porn star returning to suckle on his Texas hometown like a parasite, Rex puts both his showbiz has-been reputation and his ace comedic chops to brilliantly satirical use: If the film is, at its core, about America’s love affair with charismatic grifters, that rests largely on how magnetic Rex is in the role. He makes Mikey likable (or at least compulsively watchable), no matter how reprehensible his behavior gets. So come on, AMPAS. Complete the man’s unexpected journey to prestige with a spotlight role on “Hollywood’s biggest night.”

You know what else the Oscars love? A star-is-born moment. Licorice Pizza offers the most exciting one of those since, well, . Like Lady Gaga, Alana Haim brings the charisma of a festival headliner who knows just how to play to the camera. But she’s also wonderfully, convincingly ordinary— with a powerfully relatable understanding of the disappointments and delayed epiphanies of life in your early 20s, no matter the decade. Paul Thomas Anderson’s ’70s-set comedy comes on like a hot-for-the-babysitter fantasy, only to reveal a deeper interest in the crush object than the crusher. It’s Haim who makes that transition possible by making the movie her own: She attracts the audience as surely as Alana attracts Cooper Hoffman’s teen go-getter, and then shows us shades of petulant, sympathetic complexity that no mere daydream of male-wish-fulfillment would ever locate.