5 Dream Picks for Tomorrow's Oscar Nominations

Beyonce has 13 Grammys – 16 if you count the Destiny’s Child trophies. That’s a stupidly high amount. Meanwhile Jessica Lange, one of the most lauded thespians of the past 450 years, has two Oscars. That’s scandalous, yes, but absolutely refreshing. The Oscars matter because they honor selectively; you can’t win an Academy Award for “Best R&B Remix by a Soul Duo with Some Reggaeton Thrown In.” No: Only four acting Oscars go out every year, and that means they’re rarer than a Solange megahit. With the nominations up tomorrow, let’s count down some sleeper favorites we’d like to see in the running.

5. Anjelica Huston, 50/50

First of all, good news: Here’s a Twitpic of Anj Huston on the set of NBC’s Smash playing Scrabble on an iPad. Because dynastic priestesses of the silver screen sometimes play word games, I guess. Mind blown. Anyway: 50/50 refused to be anything but a tepid investigation of a cancer patient’s boring relationships until Huston – an Oscar winner for Prizzi’s Honor, of course – ratcheted up the film’s believable humanity with an incisive, deceptive performance as ill Adam’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) mother. This is an impressive feat when you consider that the two other major female roles in 50/50 amounted to, respectively, a cloying, one-note confidant (Anna Kendrick, reprising her Up in the Air neuroses as Adam’s novice therapist Katie McCay) and a condescendingly written a**hole girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard as Adam’s girlfriend). Huston’s performance is all conscience in a movie that mostly just wants to be cute. Dapple her with kudos, Academy.

4. Rose Byrne, Bridesmaids

Melissa McCarthy’s decent Oscar chances frighten me. She’s very funny, and maybe even a treasure, but Bridesmaids is really about two under-discussed comic performances by Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne.

Wiig is both hilarious and dour in her starring part, and Byrne is hilariously evil as the ingratiating Helen, an Eve Harrington for the Mean Girls generation. I’d rather see a cleverly devious character up for Best Supporting Actress than a grotesquely broad one, so I’m siding with Byrne. Surely she’s loaded up on Oscar angst from years of staring into Glenn Close’s hungry eyes on Damages.

3. Jeremy Irons, Margin Call

For a critically successful, star-laden ensemble film, Margin Call’s Oscar odds are damn grim. Kevin Spacey’s work in this meditation on Wall Street’s doomsday has its proponents, but the standout suit in the bleak boardroom is Jeremy Irons, whose resigned, plummy-eyed glance as CEO John Tuld serves nearly as a literal albatross preceding the market crash. The morally dubious, aristocratic character is a cinematic descendent of Claus Von Bulow, and if Irons’ Oscar win for Reversal of Fortune is any indication, he should be just as deserving of a statue this time around.

2. Charlize Theron, Young Adult

Much has been said of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s woozily entitled antiheroine – namely that she’s as hardened and unflinching as the Hello Kitty print on her raggedy tee, and that she’s profoundly unlikable – but let’s give the character and Theron’s performance its due for being the funniest attraction in a movie this year. As the delusional former prom queen who schemes to romance her suburban-settled high school ex, Theron is snarly, distant, and lovably repulsive. It’s rare that a comic performance forces you to choose between feeling sorry and feeling nothing, but Theron is game to piss you off, which means it’s more fearless than anything we’ve been told to appreciate about The Descendants or The Artist.

1. Vanessa Redgrave, Coriolanus

And now, fire. In the little-seen Shakespearean modernization whose Oscar cred is shrinking by the nanosecond, Ralph Fiennes directs the iron-veined Redgrave to her most staggering performance in years. As the titular soldier’s mother whose coercive grit melts to helpless betrayal, Redgrave is beyond present – she’s electric. She spews iambs like a possessed slam poet, pairing centuries-old verse with volcanic, timeless rage. It is the performance of 2012, and if the Academy could squeeze Redgrave into its peachy kudocast, the Oscar-viewing populace would bear witness to a mother role so terrifying, it’d shock Anthony Perkins back into the living. And that would mean a lot to me.