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Alan Arkin (Supporting Actor)
Nominated for: Little Miss Sunshine
Alternate Pick: Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
As a contract killer's reluctant shrink (two years before The Sopranos, mind you), Arkin could have played his skittish reactions to the hitman's confessions with comic neurosis, but he lends it his special blend of flat exasperation.
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Cate Blanchett (Supporting Actress)
Nominated for: Notes on a Scandal
Alternate Pick: Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
Blanchett is always particularly good in the films no one seems to notice, like The Man Who Cried (2000), Charlotte Gray (2001) and Veronica Guerin (2003), but especially in her comically brilliant role in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, playing both a spoiled movie star and her lesser-known cousin.
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Abigail Breslin (Supporting Actress)
Nominated for: Little Miss Sunshine
Alternate Pick: Keane (2004)
This 10-year-old actress had relatively little to do in Little Miss Sunshine, but in the paranoid, nervy Keane, she was responsible for keeping the disturbed hero in check, drawing him into a circle of calm and responsibility.
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Penelope Cruz (Actress)
Nominated for: Volver
Alternate Pick: Open Your Eyes (1997)
Cruz re-created this same role in the ill-advised American remake Vanilla Sky (2001), but in the more compact, intelligent Spanish original, she's a standout. It's essentially a twisty love triangle, but the entire operation hinges on Cruz. She has to be utterly enchanting, emotionally open and mysterious at the same time. She pulls all this off, and with giddy pleasure besides.
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Judi Dench (Actress)
Nominated for: Notes on a Scandal
Alternate Pick: Casino Royale (2006)
The Grande Dame looks dowdy in Notes on a Scandal, but in Casino Royale, she projects an amazing, icy disdain that could almost be read as sexy. Her few scenes with Daniel Craig have a loaded, unspoken energy that left the screen tingling.
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Leonardo DiCaprio (Actor)
Nominated for: Blood Diamond
Alternate Pick: The Departed (2006)
In Blood Diamond DiCaprio pulls off tricky accents, but in The Departed, he gives a real performance. In one scene, he gets into a bar fight, and another character pulls him off his battered victim; his baby face is gone, replaced with a new, hard, wounded look.
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Ryan Gosling (Actor)
Nominated for: Half Nelson
Alternate Pick: None
This is his best performance.
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Jackie Earle Haley (Supporting Actor)
Nominated for: Little Children
Alternate Pick: The Day of the Locust (1975)
As a teenager, Haley enjoyed a brief fame as Kelly Leak in The Bad News Bears (1976) and as Moocher in Breaking Away (1979), but his most revealing moment comes in his feature debut. John Schlesinger's film reveals the sordid underbelly of Hollywood in the 1930s, set in a courtyard apartment complex peopled with has-beens and wannabes. Haley plays a monstrous child star in a role that eerily suggests his sudden disappearance, as an adult, from movies.
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Djimon Hounsou (Supporting Actor)
Nominated for: Blood Diamond
Alternate Pick: Blueberry (2004)
Hounsou plays the noble African again and again, which is the Oscar equivalent to the "best friend" in a romantic comedy. As a result, he has yet to truly spread his acting wings. Meanwhile, his most interesting movie is this bizarre, overlooked mystical Western, based on a French comic book. He plays a gold digger opposite Eddie Izzard, who disrupts the peace in a small town, run by Marshal Blueberry (Vincent Cassel). It's not particularly a great performance, but it's the first role that allows him to break out of his rut and show some red-blooded humanity.
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Helen Mirren (Actress)
Nominated for: The Queen
Alternate Pick: Prime Suspect (1991-2006)
Mirren is wonderful here, but The Queen forgets just how physical she can be. In her famous BBC mini-series, she portrays detective Jane Tennison with a bitter resign, ready and willing to suck down a shot of booze or half-heartedly maul a cigarette. Her secret is that she looks great doing it.
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Eddie Murphy (Supporting Actor)
Nominated for: Dreamgirls
Alternate Pick: 48 Hrs. (1982)
Murphy's astonishing movie debut was an explosive entrance, equal to that zoom-in on John Wayne twirling the rifle in Stagecoach. As a temporarily freed convict opposite cop Nick Nolte, he fast-talked his way into any place he wanted, mesmerizing whole rooms full of people and still securing a human face behind the wisecracking.
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Peter O'Toole (Actor)
Nominated for: Venus
Alternate Pick: The Ruling Class (1972)
O'Toole may or may not be a great actor, but he's certainly one of the most delicious scenery-chewers in movie history. His career comes with many, many jubilant moments, but The Ruling Class, from 1972, is his most sustained bit of zaniness, playing a man who alternately believes that he's Jesus Christ, God and Jack the Ripper. O'Toole must carry the film's two and a half hours largely by himself; if he had gone over the top, he could have killed it, but he strikes a very subtle, almost unnoticeable balance between barking mad and appealingly soulful.
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Will Smith (Actor)
Nominated for: The Pursuit of Happyness
Alternate Pick: Men in Black (1997)
Smith is another in a long line of popular comic actors who long for serious recognition. Every so often he slows down to do something maudlin, such as The Pursuit of Happyness. But Smith truly shines in Men in Black; playing against Tommy Lee Jones' stony straight man and major special effects, he still springs to zingy life.
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Meryl Streep (Actress)
Nominated for: The Devil Wears Prada
Alternate Pick: A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
Streep nails her role as Miranda Priestly by using withering glances and chilly murmurs. Too bad the Academy didn't recognize her other great achievement from 2006, as Yolanda Johnson, a slightly dim, slightly deluded country singer with a smile barely pasted on her face. Over the course of the film, set during the space of a live radio broadcast, Yolanda moves beautifully, poetically from professional singer to heartbroken lover, all within the confined space of a large ensemble cast. Taken together, the two performances reveal just how extraordinarily gifted this actress is.
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Forest Whitaker (Actor)
Nominated for: The Last King of Scotland
Alternate Pick: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
Whitaker has been great for years; just look at his one little scene as a slightly psychotic pool shark in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986). He's full of sinister bluster in The Last King of Scotland, but he's really a supporting character in a mediocre film. For a real stretch, fans should catch his quiet, contained performance in Jim Jarmusch's urban samurai story. He barely has any dialogue and spends a good deal of time behind the wheel of a car, driving and listening to hip-hop, saying nothing and registering next to nothing. He's like a floating bubble of coolness, thought and serenity. But what is there is unmistakably compelling.
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Mark Wahlberg (Supporting Actor)
Nominated for: The Departed
Alternate Pick: I Heart Huckabees (2004)
Though The Departed may contain Wahlberg's very best work, it's worthwhile to look back on this very funny, fully absorbed performance as a disillusioned firefighter who finds faith in nihilism. Wahlberg is most likely a restless actor who gets easily bored, but for Huckabees he registered a breathless, enthusiastic center, as if he had found what he was searching for, even if for just a moment.
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Kate Winslet (Actress)
Nominated for: Little Children
Alternate Pick: Holy Smoke (1999)
Winslet has fallen into too many proper, Academy-approved performances (she has five nominations), often taking a back seat to the material and to her co-stars. Jane Campion's bizarre Holy Smoke was the one exception. She steals the show as a highly sensual woman besotted with Eastern religion who matches wits with a "de-programmer," played by Harvey Keitel.