9 unlikely Oscar nominations we’d love to see tomorrow

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.