For some, the most-nominated people are the ones who most “deserve” to win. That’s an awfully clinical way of looking at this! Ever heard of vibes?
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images, Momodu Mansaray/WireImage, Emma McIntyre/WireImage, Christopher Polk/WWD via Getty Images
This article originally appeared in my final Gold Rush newsletter of the ’23–’24 season. Before I sign off, I want to thank you all for letting me into your inboxes over the past two months. I hope you’ve enjoyed exploring the weird, overlooked corners of Oscar season as much as I have. But if you want more Gold Rush, fear not — in a few weeks, my colleague Joe Reid will pick up the reins to cover all things Emmys. (Sign up here.) To celebrate the handoff, Joe and I collaborated on this week’s edition. Be nice to him, and I’ll be back to intrude upon your Friday afternoons in the fall. —Nate Jones
The Academy Awards aren’t just about awarding the best films and performances of the year — stop being so naïve. They’re also about the power of narrative. And few register more strongly with both Oscar voters and awards obsessives than the “overdue” narrative, which tells us that not only is this person worthy of an Oscar, but the Academy owes it to them, as repayment for past slights. It can apply to directors like Martin Scorsese, or actors like Julianne Moore and Robert Downey Jr., or anyone who’s been nominated enough times without a single win that their image accrues a certain melodrama. When, oh when, will they finally get that Oscar they so crave? If we Oscar nerds are wondering, Oscar voters should be, too.
The recently completed Oscar season paid off a few of these narratives. Christopher Nolan got his Oscar reward after a handful of Best Picture and Best Director nominations. (He took home both for Oppenheimer.) Robert Downey Jr.’s long and sometimes volatile film career finally got its cherry on top: a Best Supporting Actor prize. But not every nominee was so fortunate, and for a handful of those who didn’t win, these Oscars just bolstered their respective cases for being “overdue.”
For some, deciding who’s “overdue” is merely a numbers game. The most-nominated actors, directors, and craftspeople are the ones who most “deserve” to win. That’s an awfully clinical way of looking at this! Ever heard of vibes? Oscar narratives are a vibes-based economy, very much attuned to how “the industry” is feeling about certain films and individuals. When it comes to who wins, there are considerations like recency, stature, and how much the would-be victor really wants it.
Not every actor or filmmaker cashes in on their “overdue” narrative. Famously, actors like Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, and Deborah Kerr went their whole careers amassing gaudy nomination totals (eight, seven, and six, respectively) but never won a competitive Oscar. But the following 31 people still have a chance. Which of their upcoming projects might get them there?
Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images
The 96th Academy Awards reshuffled Hollywood’s overdue-for-Oscar rankings considerably. Big, loud snubs for Barbie at the nomination stage, a mild upset in Best Actress, a thwarted feel-good Best Actor campaign — the following people are overdue not based on the volume of nominations they’ve lost but based on how bright the snubbery still burns in our cultural memory.
1 nom, 0 wins
There is no Oscar moment as heartbreaking as losing a trophy you were widely predicted to win. Killers of the Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone took her loss to Emma Stone for Best Actress with grace and good humor, the same qualities she showed off on the campaign trail. Some pundits argue Gladstone should have run in Supporting, but while she may have fared better in the lesser category, going lead made her the central figure of an extremely well-funded Oscar campaign, which has a star-making quality all its own. (It also gave her the priceless gift of being gassed up by Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio for months.) She’s proved she deserves to be back in the awards conversation; it’s up to the industry to give her the roles that will get her there.
Next up: Another consequence of running in lead? Two lead roles: one as a cop in the Hulu true-crime limited series Under the Bridge, and another in Reed Morano’s adaptation of The Memory Police, written by the always intriguing Charlie Kaufman. – NJ
2 noms, 0 wins
Until he got caught in the path of the Oppenheimer buzzsaw, this was supposed to be the year Giamatti won his long-overdue Oscar for The Holdovers, the Academy paying him back for snubbing him on a different Alexander Payne movie, Sideways, 20 years ago. Which raises a question: Can you get a makeup award for your makeup award? Chances don’t come around for guys like him as often as you might think, but Giamatti’s status as an actor’s actor should help in the event he does get another at-bat.
Next up: IMDb only has one upcoming project: San Andreas 2, which is apparently “in development.” However, according to Holdovers scribe David Hemingson, there’s a part for Giamatti waiting in the western he’s writing for Payne. One of these projects sounds much more Oscar-y than the other. – NJ
4 noms, 0 wins
For a filmmaker whose first three solo directorial features have been nominated for Best Picture, it may seem odd to assign Greta Gerwig an overdue narrative. But thanks to one nomination she didn’t get — a Best Director nod for Barbie this year — Gerwig’s Oscar story has attained a note of grievance. Whether or not you think the backlash to the Barbie snubs went overboard, the fact remains that among the entertainment press and fans who care about these kinds of things, the question is no longer “Will Greta Gerwig’s next film be an Oscar player?” but rather “Is this the project that will win her that first Oscar?”
Next up: Gerwig is already working on her next great work of adaptation: Netflix’s The Chronicles of Narnia project. The mid-aughts series of Narnia films got a small handful of technical nominations but never broke through to the major categories. But given how Gerwig has shown she can muscle a classic text into feeling modern, as she did with Little Women, and work on a blockbuster scale, as with Barbie, Narnia might have the makings of another Oscar smash. And lest we forget she’s also a gifted actress, she’ll be appearing in husband Noah Baumbach’s next picture, as yet untitled. – JR
3 noms, 0 wins
Back in, say, the early aughts, an actress who looked like Margot Robbie would have a surefire route to an Oscar: pile on the makeup to play an ugly person. Thankfully, there are more interesting paths available now. Through her LuckyChap shingle, Robbie has proven herself as a producer with a keen eye for talent and a knack for buzzy loglines. Gerwig comes out of Barbie feeling more overdue, but there’s every chance Robbie beats her director to an Oscar — in Best Picture rather than Best Actress.
Next up: As an actress, Robbie is set to star in the romance A Big Bold Beautiful Journey from director Kogonada, an art-house fave making a leap to more accessible fare. As a producer, she’s got the Olivia Wilde–helmed Christmas comedy Naughty. – NJ
Photo: JC Olivera/Getty Images
Perception is everything in Hollywood, and while nearly everyone in the business wants to win an Oscar, some are perceived as being more obvious about it than others. The media’s reaction to this kind of thirst can be pretty bitchy and unfair. We’ve all written our apology notes to Anne Hathaway, whose Les Misérables campaign for Best Supporting Actress in 2013 was relentlessly mocked online for being “try-hard.” But for the moment, the following folks’ apparent desperation to win will define every Oscar conversation they’re in until they finally grab a trophy.
8 noms, 0 wins
It’s a facial expression that will stay with me until the day I die: Glenn Close’s face, frozen in a forcibly gracious smile, suppressing a scream as Olivia Colman was announced as the Best Actress of 2018. That is the look of a woman who thought her day had finally come — her first Oscar — only to get beaten to the punch once again. Close coughed up another nominated performance two years later for Hillbilly Elegy, but, thankfully, she didn’t win for that. Now she’s the poster actress for Oscar futility. The cautionary tale for everybody else.
Next up: Back in Action, a Jamie Foxx–Cameron Diaz action-comedy from the director of Identity Thief and Horrible Bosses, does not sound like the stuff of long-awaited Oscar wins. But Close will also be in the Lee Daniels horror movie The Deliverance, which at least sounds awesome. – JR
12 noms, 0 wins
When a movie star decides they want to direct, you might expect them to excel at publicly performing the role of filmmaker, even if their actual filmmaking is mediocre. The strange thing about Bradley Cooper’s directorial career is that the reverse occurred: His first two movies earned Best Picture nominations, at the cost of the public and voters alike recoiling from Cooper’s whole deal. On the Star Is Born campaign, Cooper was dinged for acting too above it all to play the game; on Maestro, he campaigned so hard that he violated the unwritten rule against wanting it too much. On one hand, the guy can’t win; on the other, if you want to get an Oscar, this is the job. A possible silver lining: The Maestro backlash got so intense that I wonder if people will start to feel bad about overdoing it, setting Cooper up for an Anne Hathaway–style rehabilitation down the line.
Next up: Cooper’s already set up his next directorial effort: a dark comedy called Is This Thing On?, in which he’ll co-star alongside Will Arnett. In his day job as a Hollywood leading man, he’s set to star in Steven Spielberg’s Bullitt revamp, which will reportedly shoot this year. Neither of these projects is a Frank Rizzo biopic. – NJ
15 noms, 0 wins
When songwriter Diane Warren was presented with an honorary Oscar in 2022 for her lifetime of service to the film industry in the form of writing power ballads for every possible cinematic occasion, one school of thought supposed that she might stop aggressively pursuing nominations in the Best Original Song category. What fools. Judging by her back-to-back nominations for Tell It Like a Woman in 2023 and Flamin’ Hot in 2024, Warren is as hard-core as ever about earning that first competitive Oscar. See also the “mini-tantrum” she allegedly threw at this year’s ceremony when the Best Original Song presenters didn’t read the names of the nominees. At this point, Oscar voters may be left with the decision to give it to Warren and end this madness or continue to deny her and see how far this bullet train to hell can go.
Next up: Perhaps in an attempt to cut out the middleman, a documentary on Warren’s life and career, Diane Warren: Relentless, just premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The film features an original song called “Dear Me,” written by Warren and performed by Kesha. This has gotta be the one, right? – JR
Photo: Amy Sussman/WireImage
This group is where we start to see some palpably unbalanced ledgers. Big nomination totals opposite that big goose egg for “wins.” For an actor, by the time they hit that fourth nomination without a win, people start to notice. Craftspeople usually go eight or nine nominations before anyone realizes. The following people have gone well beyond that, and it’s starting to feel awfully conspicuous. Should they take these snubs personally?
6 noms, 0 wins
Amy Adams “winning an Oscar for her work in Hillbilly Elegy would be worse than her never winning an Oscar at all,” Adams superfan Chris Murphy wrote for Vulture in 2020. From his lips to God’s ears. After an astonishing opening run of six nominations in 14 years — though not one for Arrival, arguably her career peak — Adams hasn’t come within sight of an Oscar since strapping on that voluminous Elegy wig. Recent choices like Disenchanted and Dear Evan Hansen speak to an actor with other priorities than awards at this point, but whenever Adams steps back into the world of prestige cinema, expect the “overdue” narrative to factor heavily into the conversation.
Next up: Adams is heading to Hulu for Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, about a mom who transforms into a dog at night. Even if it can’t land her the Oscar, the film may at least get the stans back onboard. She’s also got Taika Waititi’s Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation Klara and the Sun, and the comedy The Invite from Little Miss Sunshine’s Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. – NJ
5 noms, 0 wins
If it weren’t for Amy Adams, we’d be talking a lot more about how Michelle Williams doesn’t have an Oscar yet. Fittingly, both actresses got their first nomination in the same year, in the same category, falling to The Constant Gardener’s Best Supporting Actress Rachel Weisz in 2006. Since then, Adams has had more high-profile projects, while Williams has kept delivering award-worthy work when it just wasn’t her year. She was never expected to beat out Natalie Portman for Black Swan or Viola Davis for Fences or Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady. Two years ago, though, it seemed like she might cruise to a Supporting Actress win for playing a version of Steven Spielberg’s dreamily difficult mother. Instead, Williams pushed for leading actress categorization, and she got bulldozed by Michelle Yeoh. But for the first time, Williams’s bad luck with Oscar became part of her press narrative.
Next up: If Todd Haynes ever makes this Peggy Lee movie he’s been talking about forever, Williams might play the lead role. Playing Marilyn Monroe didn’t work for her, but biopics are still a trusted avenue toward the Oscar. – JR
5 noms, 0 wins
An Oscar win for Nyad was just never going to be in the cards, no matter how good Bening was at playing “stung by jellyfish.” But after five losses for movies like The Grifters, American Beauty, and The Kids Are All Right, not to mention a few high-profile nomination snubs (20th Century Women, I refuse to let this go), Bening’s career is starting to look conspicuously underrewarded. What’s more, Bening is always willing to play the game and show up for a roundtable or an “actor interviews actor” gambit. She will lend an air of gravitas to your red-carpet event.
Next up: Bening is currently embroiled in a family maybe-murder mystery on Peacock in Apples Never Fall, but in 2025, she will appear in director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter follow-up, currently titled The Bride. Yes, it is a Bride of Frankenstein riff, and after Gyllenhaal directed Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley to nominations with The Lost Daughter, there is every reason to be excited about the Oscar prospects for this one. – JR
15 noms, 0 wins
The trouble with craftspeople’s Oscar campaigns is that they tend to let the work speak for itself. That’s not a bad thing in theory, but it does allow for each individual nomination to exist in a vacuum, estranged from the nominees’ other work. It’s a little-known wrinkle that, aside from the acting categories, individual names don’t appear on the Oscar ballot; you don’t vote for Hans Zimmer in Best Original Score, you vote for Inception. It’s why Killers of the Flower Moon wasn’t able to rally sentimental votes for the late Robbie Robertson’s score. And it’s why voters can keep passing over Thomas Newman, often without realizing they’re doing so. One man composed the instantly recognizable scores for Fried Green Tomatoes, The Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Finding Nemo, Little Children, WALL-E, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and 1917 — among dozens more — and has never once won that Best Original Score Oscar statue. Something truly must be done.
Next up: There’s currently nothing listed on IMDb for Newman, though his frequent collaborator Sam Mendes (for whom Newman has composed four Oscar-nominated scores) did just announce he’s planning to make four Beatles movies. – JR
Photo: JC Olivera/Getty Images
These are the less obviously Oscar-parched, but their extensive résumés, combined with their stature in the business, make it fair for them to ask, “When’s it my turn?”
4 noms, 0 wins
You don’t think of Ruffalo as a long-suffering Oscar bridesmaid, in part because of his low-key public persona, but also because his nominations have mostly come for steady, unshowy performances. (All four have been in Supporting Actor.) His buffoonish turn in Poor Things displayed unexpected range, and considering how much the Academy loved Yorgos Lanthimos’s film, he may well have been the runner-up to Robert Downey Jr. when all the votes were tallied. Like his former MCU castmate, all it might take is the right supporting role in the right Best Picture contender for Ruffalo to get his moment, too.
Next up: Another supporting role in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite follow-up Mickey 17, which has been ominously pushed back to January 2025. Before that, the two-time Emmy winner will return to TV as the father of Cooper Raiff and Lili Reinhart (who are playing literal children?) in Raiff’s Hal & Harper. – NJ
4 noms, 0 wins
The benefits of starting young: Though she’s yet to turn 30, Ronan has as many Oscar nominations as Joanne Woodward, Burt Lancaster, Barbara Stanwyck, and Warren Beatty. The flip side, however, is that voters may feel less pressure to award her, assuming she’ll be back again soon. What gives Ronan an edge is having two plausible paths to a trophy. Her fruitful creative partnership with Greta Gerwig could see both rewarded in tandem, and if that doesn’t work out, there will always be British period pieces in the running.
Next up: What did I just say about period pieces? Ronan will star in Steve McQueen’s Blitz, which could get her to nom No. 5 as early as next year. On the less Oscar-y side of the biz, she’s playing a teacher who locks a misbehaving student in her home in a film called Bad Apples. It’s a comedy! – NJ
4 noms, 0 wins
Though Dafoe narrowly missed out on a nomination for Poor Things, he can take solace in the fact that he played a large part in the film winning Best Makeup & Hairstyling. Filmmakers will be casting him as craggy creepers until the day he dies, but getting the Oscar will likely take a performance nobody expects, as in his nominated turn as a kindly handyman in The Florida Project.
Next up: Dafoe works a lot, and he’s got a bevy of intriguing projects lined up, the most promising being Yorgos Lanthimos’s anthology film Kinds of Kindness and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu remake. – NJ
4 noms, 0 wins
If it slipped your mind that Ed Harris is among the most-nominated currently working actors with zero Oscar wins, it’s probably because it’s been over two decades since his last nomination. But transport yourself back to the ’90s, and maybe you’ll recall that Harris came within a hair’s breadth of winning Best Supporting Actor twice in the span of four years. In 1995, he won the SAG Award and the Critics Choice for Apollo 13; in 1998, he won the Golden Globe and the National Board of Review awards for The Truman Show. It was only a matter of time for Harris, it seemed. But two more nominations, for Pollock and The Hours, came in the early aughts, and it’s been mostly TV awards since. But while his Oscar heat may have cooled, a savvy studio could always light that lamp again with a clever campaign.
Next up: He’ll be playing the role of James Tyrone Jr. (the role that won Tony Awards for Fredric March and Brian Dennehy) in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, opposite Jessica Lange. – JR
3 noms, 0 wins
Inside Ryan Gosling there are two wolves. One is an ultraserious, mysteriously Brooklyn-accented dramatic actor; the other a silly himbo who can ham it up with the best of them. The latter provided the standout moment of this year’s telecast, but will the industry let him win an Oscar for comedy? And furthermore, does Gosling himself want to?
Next up: On the immediate horizon is the stuntman rom-com The Fall Guy, which our own Bilge Ebiri calls “a delight.” Further out is a role as an amnesiac astronaut in Project Hail Mary, based on a book by The Martian’s Andy Weir. If Matt Damon can get nominated … – NJ
3 noms, 0 wins
A few years ago, it seemed like Carey Mulligan might never actually follow up her breakthrough Oscar nomination for 2009’s An Education. She kept delivering great performances that got ignored in movies like Shame, Far From the Madding Crowd, Mudbound, and Wildlife. But with Best Actress nods for Promising Young Woman and this year for Maestro, Mulligan is on the cusp of “overdue.” She hasn’t lost often enough to surpass the Amy Adamses and Michelle Williamses of the world — much less the Glenn Closes — but with one more widely acclaimed and nominated performance, there certainly won’t be any sense that she hasn’t paid her dues.
Next up: One for the Money, a British comedy about a lottery winner where she doesn’t even play the lottery winner. Gonna have to do better than that. – JR
Photo: Stefania D’Alessandro/WireImage
Since they can be nominated multiple times for producing/directing/writing the same film, filmmakers tend to amass more nominations than anyone else. It takes a little bit longer for the public to realize that the Academy really owes them one. But when they do, having multiple shots at gold can pay off. Ideally, this would be a Best Director win, but consider someone like Spike Lee. His film BlacKkKlansman didn’t win Picture or Director in 2019, but Lee was still able to end his Oscar drought by taking Adapted Screenplay, and the gleeful reaction he shared with frequent collaborator and pal Samuel L. Jackson was proof that an Oscar is an Oscar. (Unless it’s for a short film.)
11 noms, 0 wins
Directors’ nomination totals may tend to be inflated, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar drought extends for six films over 25 years. And that’s not even counting The Master, which was nominated for three acting awards but earned nothing for PTA. He’s legitimately overdue. Scorsese lost out on nominations for six films before his seventh, The Departed, finally won him Best Director and Best Picture. So maybe after losses for Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread, and Licorice Pizza, Anderson’s next film will be the one where the media drumbeat for an Oscar starts nice and early.
Next up: Anderson’s next film is shrouded in mystery and intrigue. We know it will star Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Alana Haim. The budget has been reported as a whopping $115 million. The rumor mill says it’s another Thomas Pynchon adaptation. The worry is that David Zaslav’s ruthlessly cost-cutting regime at Warner Bros. will do something to undermine it. It’s due out in 2025, which means there will be plenty of time for a PTA Oscar narrative to assert itself in the meantime. – JR
6 noms (if you count the Foreign Language nod for Dogtooth), 0 wins.
Lanthimos’s films occupy the modern Oscars’ sweet spot: weird enough to feel fresh and daring, but still accessible enough to find favor with large swathes of voters. Having now directed two Best Actress–winning performances, in films that each earned double-digit nominations, the Greek auteur is officially one of the Academy’s guys. It’s fair to ask, though: If it wasn’t his year even when Poor Things won the Golden Lion at Venice, when will it be his year? We can’t know until we get there, but in the meantime, it would behoove Lanthimos to study Guillermo del Toro, whose campaigns for films people also worry are too weird for Oscar have proven remarkably successful.
Next up: Another team-up with Emma Stone in the anthology The Kinds of Kindness. It’s dated for June, so a premiere at Cannes, which now rivals the fall festivals as an Oscar launchpad, might be in the cards. – NJ
8 noms, 1 win
Yes, Wes Anderson did just win an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short for The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Yes, the Oscar statues for short films are just as tall as the other Oscars. Still, that trophy feels like small consolation (sorry) for a filmmaker whose features are so expansive and creatively unbridled. With the notable exception of The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was nominated for nine Oscars (including Anderson for Best Director) and won four (excluding Anderson for Best Director), Anderson’s films have been curiously underrewarded in places that seem like no-brainers. How are his movies not always nominated for Production Design and Costumes? How were standout performances like Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, Bill Murray in Rushmore, and Ralph Fiennes in Grand Budapest never acknowledged? How was last year’s Asteroid City shut out entirely? Do you see how that Short Film win can’t possibly make up for all this snubbery?
Next up: Anderson has always got something in the works. He’s currently working on The Phoenician Scheme, what’s been described as a “dark espionage tale” starring Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Bill Murray, and Mia Threapleton (Kate Winslet’s daughter). – JR
7 noms, 1 win
Like Wes Anderson, McDonagh does have a Live Action Short trophy (for his 2004 short Six Shooter), but since he won that before he became famous in the U.S., it almost doesn’t count. The director’s branch has so far been resistant to his foulmouthed morality plays, and I can’t see McDonagh ever mounting enough of a charm offensive to win Best Picture. But the former playwright can always count on getting into Original Screenplay, and all it takes is a year where most of the other big players are in Adapted for him to get his podium moment, which I expect to be almost entirely bleeped.
Next up: In 2021, the trades reported his next film would star Oscar Isaac, Sam Rockwell, and Christopher Walken, but we haven’t heard much about it since. – NJ
4 noms, 0 wins
Ridley Scott’s Oscar narrative is as much about the films he wasn’t nominated for (Blade Runner, Alien, the secretly excellent The Last Duel) than the ones that did make the cut and ultimately lost. Still, the biggest gripe will always come down to Gladiator winning Best Picture but Scott losing the Best Director trophy to Traffic’s Steven Soderbergh. That story might actually resurface this year, if things break a certain way, because …
Next up: Scott is entering the Coliseum once again with the as-yet-unsubtitled Gladiator 2 (it’s going to be called Gladiator: Echoes in Eternity, I just know it). – JR
3 noms, 0 wins
Joining PTA as the other major ’90s auteur yet to get his due from the Academy, Fincher has a mercurial relationship with Oscar. It’s easy to think of him as a bad-boy Gen-Xer unconcerned with something as silly as awards season, and yet, films like Benjamin Button and Mank were well within the bounds of the Academy’s taste and were nominated accordingly. Last year’s The Killer saw Fincher operating in the tight, slight mode of his pal Steven Soderbergh, and if that’s where he is from now on, we may always look back at The Social Network as his one that got away.
Next up: His relationship with Netflix continues apace, with multiple projects in development at the streamer. At least we know his awards campaigns will continue to be well funded. – NJ
Photo: Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
This is the tier where celebrated Hollywood veterans who have been repeatedly passed over for nominations reside. It’s harder to nail down Oscar narratives for them, since they’re never really in the conversation. But every now and then, suddenly, they turn up in a movie that’s getting Oscar buzz, like JLC did with Everything Everywhere All at Once, and that overdue Oscar narrative settles in hard.
Angela Bassett (2 nominations, 0 wins): For a minute there in 2022, it seemed like Bassett’s incredible body of work might result in her winning Best Supporting Actress for a Marvel movie. Her time has to be coming soon, right? – JR
Harrison Ford (1 nomination, 0 wins): Wait, didn’t he win for Witness? Nope, though that remains his only nomination. (William Hurt won for Kiss of the Spider-Woman that year instead.) – NJ
Alfre Woodard (1 nomination, 0 wins): She’s a four-time Emmy Award winner, but Alfre Woodard’s lone Oscar nomination came 40 years ago (!) for a film called Cross Creek. – JR
Hugh Grant (0 nominations, 0 wins): His reinvention as a baddie could earn him a late-in-life Supporting trophy, but reading between the lines of recent reports, Grant may be in the Sylvester Stallone/Eddie Murphy zone of having been too mean to too many people to ever win. – NJ
John Goodman (0 nominations, 0 wins): Barton Fink? The Big Lebowski? Argo? Not a single nomination to be found. No shade to character actors like J.K. Simmons and Jim Broadbent, but how have they beaten John Goodman to the podium? – JR
Donald Sutherland (0 nominations, 0 wins): They gave him an honorary trophy in 2017, but now that we’ve lost Christopher Plummer, somebody’s gotta play those parts. (Remember, he’s done it before.) – NJ
Meg Ryan (0 nominations, 0 wins): She doesn’t work much anymore, but perhaps seeing son Jack Quaid appear in Best Picture winner Oppenheimer will spur something inside of her. – NJ
Samuel L. Jackson (1 nomination, 0 wins): He got an honorary Oscar in 2022, but if Netflix’s adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson has heat, expect to hear a lot about how the highest-grossing actor of all time is overdue for proper recognition. – NJ