The most underrated performances in Oscar history

Every February, the Academy Awards dominate coverage on streaming platforms and pub televisions across Sydney and Melbourne, but the conversation rarely lingers on the performances that voters quietly ignored. The ballot favours familiar shapes: biopics, transformative physical work, the kind of roles that lend themselves to montage reels. Plenty of actors have delivered the performance of a lifetime only to find themselves cut from the highlight package, and history has been kinder to some of these turns than the Academy ever was.

The reasons vary. Campaign strategy rewards films with committed publicists and the stamina to host four dozen Q&As across Los Angeles. Genre pictures rarely break through, with horror, science fiction, and broad comedy often shut out even when the work is breathtaking. Performances that depend on stillness or a slow build tend to evaporate against the noise of awards season. Voters, like everyone who queues at the Palace Cinema in Brighton for a Friday night session, sometimes miss the picture everyone else is talking about weeks later.

Geography plays its part. A film that never secures a wide release, or that disappears from Australian multiplexes within a fortnight, struggles to build the momentum the Academy rewards. Screen Australia-funded productions that never quite break into the international conversation often carry performances that would have been locks in a parallel universe. Voters also lean toward American stories, American accents, and the kind of narrative that travels through HBO and Netflix without friction.

What follows is a record of the overlooked, the snubbed, and the quietly forgotten. Some of the names will be familiar. Others will prompt a double-take. The thread running through all of them is the same: a performer at the height of their craft, working at a level that should have demanded attention, and receiving a shrug instead.

The supporting turns that faded too fast

Barkhad Abdi's first major role made him a familiar name in 2013, even if the household in question happened to be spread across Adelaide's Somali community and the inner suburbs of Melbourne. His turn as the pirate leader Muse in Captain Phillips was ferocious, contained, and terrifyingly human. The film earned six nominations and won two, but Abdi watched as the Supporting Actor conversation turned into a two-horse race between Jared Leto and Michael Fassbender. The Academy later invited him back as a presenter, which is a kind of apology, though not the kind most actors would accept.

A similar story played out for Michael Shannon. The Illinois-born actor has built a reputation on intense, watchful work, from Take Shelter to 99 Homes. His turn in Revolutionary Road sat at the centre of a Sam Mendes drama that earned five nods, but Shannon himself was overlooked in favour of more conventional contenders. Australian cinephiles who queued for the film at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2008 remember his explosive dinner-party scene as the beating heart of the movie, but the Academy never did find the rhythm.

Lead performances buried by their own films

Albert Brooks spent decades as one of Hollywood's most thoughtful comic voices, and his work in Drive elevated him to something else entirely. As Bernie Rose, he carried the film's most quietly devastating arc, a study in menace, regret, and small-business villainy that earned him a BAFTA nod and nothing else. The film collected a single nomination for Sound Editing, and Brooks walked away empty-handed. It is the kind of supporting turn that should have run away with the category, and the fact that it didn't tells you everything about the Academy's blind spots.

A similar fate has befallen the work of character actors in films that the Academy treated as beneath consideration. John Cazale delivered five feature performances in his short life, including The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter, and never received a single nomination. Three of those films won Best Picture. Cazale's screen presence has only grown with the decades, yet the Academy never found a place for him on the ballot. Australian film students at AFTRS still treat his handful of performances as a foundational text.

Comedic work the Academy refuses to reward

The Academy has a tortured relationship with comedy, awarding it sparingly and often only when the role leans toward pathos. Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder, Bill Murray in every performance he has ever given, and the cast of any number of beloved Australian sitcoms all sit in this graveyard. Murray's work in Lost in Translation and Groundhog Day is a case in point. The first earned him a nomination that he lost to Sean Penn, and the second didn't even register on the final ballot. Australian comedy fans who caught the film on a VHS rental in the early nineties remember Murray's slow-burn transformation, but the Academy treated the entire picture as a footnote.

It is a problem local audiences understand well. The Australian film and television industry has produced comic performances that work brilliantly in context and disappear in the international conversation. Magda Szubanski's long career, the early work of Rebel Wilson, and the cast of any number of cult Australian comedies demonstrate how easily the Academy passes over the kind of comic timing that can stop a room at The Imperial in Erskineville on a Saturday night. The discipline of making people laugh, and then making them laugh again, demands a craft that rarely registers on a ballot.

Australian performances the ballot forgot

Toni Collette's career has been marked by the kind of range the Academy claims to celebrate. Her work in Muriel's Wedding, The Sixth Sense, and Little Miss Sunshine earned her the one nomination she eventually received, for The Sixth Sense back in 2000, but the conversation around her work has long outpaced any trophy shelf. The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts has been more generous, awarding her multiple AACTA prizes, and her work in Knives Out and Pieces of a Woman has continued to demonstrate the kind of versatility the Oscars prefer to admire at a distance.

Essie Davis has had a similar journey, giving two of the most physically demanding performances in recent Australian cinema with The Babadook and The Dressmaker. Neither film registered in the acting categories, though both have grown in stature with the years. Ben Mendelsohn has carved out a career as a character actor of rare range, from Animal Kingdom to Bloodline to The Place Beyond the Pines. He was nominated for Supporting Actor in 2017 for the last of those, but the conversation often skipped over his quieter, more devastating turns. Hugo Weaving's body of work, stretching from The Interview to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to the Matrix trilogy, has been similarly overlooked. The Academy tends to look past the kind of work Australian audiences celebrate at AACTA ceremonies and around dinner tables in Fitzroy.

Quiet work that aged into masterpieces

Some performances look different with distance. The kind of work that felt underwhelming in 1996 can look like a revelation in 2024, and the reverse happens often enough to be a pattern. Peter Sellers in Being There played a character so still and so strange that critics at the time struggled to describe what they were seeing. The film earned him a BAFTA but no Academy Award, and the consensus has shifted dramatically since. His work in Dr. Strangelove, also unrewarded at the time, now sits near the top of any list of screen comedy.

A similar revision has happened around Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. She earned the nomination in 1944 and lost to Ingrid Bergman, a decision that has aged badly. Her work in the film is, by any honest measure, the most daring female performance of the decade, a study in greed, manipulation, and self-destruction. Australian film historians who teach screen acting at the Victorian College of the Arts have used her work as a case study for years, and the rest of the world is catching up. Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby belongs in the same conversation, a performance of such precision and creeping terror that the film still frightens audiences who first watched it on a worn-out VHS at a family home in Brisbane.

The genre problem the Academy has never solved

The most consistent pattern in the Academy's blind spots is genre. Horror performances are routinely ignored, even when they redefine what the form can do. Toni Collette in Hereditary remains the most glaring omission of the last decade. Australian viewers who caught the film at the Sydney Film Festival in 2018 already knew what they were seeing: a woman falling apart on screen with such precision that audiences were still shaking in the car park afterwards. The film earned no acting nominations, and Collette watched as the entire genre was treated as a write-off.

The same story plays out across science fiction, fantasy, and action. Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems delivered a performance of such relentless, sweaty energy that even his harshest critics had to acknowledge the craft. The film earned no nominations at all, and Sandler has remained on the outside of the Academy's good graces for his entire career. Science fiction has fared little better, with only the occasional Star Wars or Alien nod breaking through. Australian genre audiences who queue at Palace Cinemas in the inner suburbs, or who pack out the Sydney Film Festival's Midnight Madness strand, know this pattern intimately. The work is there. The recognition, almost always, is not.