One of the great joys of following Oscar season is those moments when an actor or actress who really deserves it—who's been putting in great work for years, with performances that have endeared them to audiences and impressed both critics and fans—finally hits big with Oscar: Julianne Moore finally getting her moment in the spotlight in 2015 and winning best actress for Still Alice after four previous nominations; Jennifer Jason Leigh’s first nomination, in best supporting actress, for The Hateful Eight, paying off years of snubs and near misses; Christopher Plummer getting his very first Oscar nomination at age 80. For those of us who follow the machinations of the Oscars closely, it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that for every performer, their time will come.
But of course that’s not true. Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, and Deborah Kerr never won their long-awaited competitive Oscars (though both Kerr and O’Toole earned honorary Oscars). Meg Ryan, John Cusack, and Donald Sutherland are among many acclaimed and accomplished performers who have still never been nominated (Sutherland has received an honorary Oscar, though). Certainly, we’ll have plenty of further opportunities to discuss the tempestuous Oscar fortunes of Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
But the 2021 Oscar season, even in its nascent fall-festival stage, is offering signs of hope that some overdue performers might finally be getting their Oscar moment, whether a first nomination or a long-awaited win. So much of Oscar success can be circumstantial, but for Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Will Smith, and several others, the circumstances might finally be right.
At the moment, all of the buzz in the best-actress race is swirling around Kristen Stewart for her performance as Princess Diana in Spencer. For starters, the role ticks off all the boxes on paper; playing a real-life figure with a tragic story who remains an indelible part of the zeitgeist has served the likes of Renée Zellweger in Judy, Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn, and perhaps most pertinent to this conversation, Natalie Portman in Jackie, which was directed by Spencer’s Pablo Larraín. The reviews for Spencer coming out of the Venice, Telluride, and Toronto film festivals have also been effusive
This is not exactly a new phenomenon for Stewart. Despite a career that could have easily found itself pigeonholed by one role and franchise—Bella Swan in the Twilight movies—Stewart has taken to the art house route in recent years, becoming something of a film-festival all-star with films like Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria, the latter of which won her prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, as well as a César Award, France’s equivalent of an Oscar. Back in 2014, both Stewart and Sils Maria were too far outside of the mainstream Oscar fare to mount serious consideration by the Academy. But those aforementioned performances, and the critical respect they amassed, all bolster the argument that Stewart is overdue for Academy recognition. While her shelf of fancy-schmancy plaudits still likely pales in comparison to that of the Teen Choice and MTV Movie Awards she won for Twilight, there can be no doubt that she's successfully made the transition from teen star to serious actress. Now would be the exact right time for the Academy to christen that transition with her first-ever Oscar nomination (and very possibly a win).
Another actress who’s had to navigate the choppy waters en route from child stardom to respected actress is Kirsten Dunst, whose 30-plus-year career has encompassed just about everything except an Oscar nomination. The closest she came was likely when she was only 12 years old and a Golden Globe nominee for her performance as an eternally childlike creature of the night in 1994’s Interview With the Vampire. Her role as Mary Jane Watson in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies put her at the forefront of the younger actresses of her generation, but subsequent brushes with awards-worthiness all managed to land outside of awards voters’ field of vision. Dunst excelled in her work with Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette, most especially), but those weren’t the Sofia Coppola movies that Oscar latched on to. In 2001 she earned raves for playing the part of Marion Davies in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow, decades before Amanda Seyfried would get an Oscar nomination for playing the same role in Mank. Dunst’s tender heartbreak in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is in many ways the secret weapon of that film, though perhaps too secret, as she was too easily overshadowed by Kate Winslet’s lead performance come awards season. The 2012 dark comedy Bachelorette featured Dunst’s blistering and caustic turn as a vicious bridesmaid—but barely anybody saw the film.
Perhaps the most frustrating of Dunst’s award-season misses was 2011’s Melancholia, where her performance as a depressed woman facing down the end of the world was justly rewarded with the Cannes Film Festival’s best-actress prize. And yet any possible awards campaign for that admittedly dark and difficult film was killed in the crib by director Lars von Trier’s controversial comments at the festival’s press conference, where he decided to get puckish about how he sympathized with Hitler.
Now, Dunst is back in the awards conversation for her role as a widow tormented by a rancher in director Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which has emerged as one of the top critical darlings of festival season. And while the reviews have more heavily focused on Benedict Cumberbatch’s lead performance, this is easily Dunst’s best chance in years to finally get the Oscar attention she’s long deserved. Horrifying as it may feel that Torrance from Bring It On could mount a campaign predicated on her long career, that’s exactly the angle that could earn her a nomination at last.
Will Smith has in fact been nominated for an Oscar twice—for his performances in 2001’s Ali and 2006’s The Pursuit of Happyness. Somehow it’s been 15 years since that last nomination, though, a drought that could very likely come to an end given the rave reviews for his performance as Venus and Serena Williams’s father in King Richard. And if Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson is correct in his prediction, this will be the role that finally wins him that statuette. Smith’s appeal as a potential Oscar winner has always been that of the A-list movie star who shows unexpected depths in a dramatic role. Brad Pitt followed that same path, and it finally paid off for him at the 2020 Oscars. For Smith, an Oscar win would not only galvanize a top-shelf career, it would also mark his emergence from a fallow period that’s included high-profile misses like Collateral Beauty and Gemini Man.
But it’s more than the blockbuster megastars who may finally get their long-awaited Oscar breakthroughs this year. Will Peter Dinklage’s performance in director Joe Wright’s musical rendering of Cyrano net the Game of Thrones Emmy winner the Oscar attention that eluded him back when he first emerged in The Station Agent in 2003? Is this the year that Academy voters finally find a way to honor a performer like Jeffrey Wright, who’s won an Emmy and a Tony but has never managed to catch the lightning in a bottle that characterizes Oscar success? He’s one of many actors populating Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, but he’s managed to stand out in the (admittedly mixed) reviews of the film. Ann Dowd is another performer who’s seen the bulk of her success on TV, but ever since her performance in the Sundance hit Mass, the rumblings about a first Oscar nomination for the longtime actress have been getting louder.
There are few things more fickle than the taste of the Academy’s voting body on a year-to-year basis. The alchemy for success can shift from ingenues to veterans, populist to snobby. But if even a few of these longtime Oscar bridesmaids can finally get their moment in the spotlight, it should be a fun awards season to follow.
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