Oscars 2024: Who should win best actor?

Can it really be that Paul Giamatti had only received a solitary Academy Award nomination prior to this year? That’s what it says on Wikipedia, so it must be true.

For a man of such outstanding talent, it seems only right Giamatti has won a second for his performance in The Holdovers. This is no mere token appearance though. Rather, Alexander Payne’s love letter to ’70s cinema sees Giamatti delivering a typically nuanced performance, producing one of cinema’s great misanthropes in Paul Hunham.

Giamatti plays a teacher at a New England boarding school in the early 1970s, one who finds himself stuck looking after a few left-behind students and the school’s cafeteria manager one snowy Christmas.

It’s a brilliant film, and a true return to form for the director who once brought us Nebraska and The Descendants. But it’s all anchored by an outstanding performance from one of the best character actors working in Hollywood.

After Ireland drew a blank in the 2023 best actor award category (Paul Mescal and Colin Farrell can both feel hard done by), Cillian Murphy is here to restore some Gaelic pride. Given he’s starring in the hottest film of the season, he might just pull it off.

Oppenheimer is widely expected to sweep the board and come home with a bunch of golden statues. Murphy’s central performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, isn’t quite enough to make him a shoo-in – there’s strong competition elsewhere on this list – but it certainly places him among the frontrunners.

Murphy plays the role of the conflicted scientist with quiet intensity, at first directed towards completing the ambitious Manhattan Project that yielded the world’s first (and hitherto only) use of nuclear weapons in war, and then in contemplating the repercussions of his actions.

The Oscars loves a good physical transformation, as last year’s win for Brendan Fraser goes to show, and Murphy even has that covered. His fragile, world weary frame speaks to a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Jeffrey Wright’s first ever Oscar nomination could make him an outside bet for the big prize. Wright has grade-A pedigree, a substantial body of work, and the sense that he’s been unfairly overlooked in previous years. That’s a powerful combination come Oscar time.

Not that his performance in American Fiction isn’t worthy of winning the prize on its own merits. Cord Jefferson’s satire skewers the perception of black culture in America with expert precision.

Central to that is Wright, who plays exasperated novelist Thelonious Ellison. Having written a trope-filled novel in a fit of pique, he’s astonished to find it shooting to the top of the bestsellers chart.

Throw in a complicated family dynamic with his siblings, and Wright is given every chance to flesh out his frustrated academic.

George C. Wolfe’s movie seeks to bring the often overlooked American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin into the spotlight, and Colman Domingo’s phenomenal performance in the lead role seals the deal.

Rustin was a close friend and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. during the ’60s, but found his homosexuality used as a tool to isolate him from the cause. His response, to help organise a march on Washington despite heavy opposition from his comrades, makes for an inspirational story.

If the film’s somewhat low-key, functional style (it’s a Netflix production through and through) doesn’t exactly do its larger-than-life subject justice, Domingo’s flamboyant turn most certainly does.

In truth, Rustin the film can’t hope to stand with the other films featured in the Oscars running, but Colman Domingo’s performance is up there with the best. Which is arguably even more impressive.

There’s no getting away from it. Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic is about as naked an awards grab as you’re likely to find.

Cooper writes, directs, and stars in a film about one of America’s true musical geniuses. His role incorporates transformational (and somewhat controversial) prosthetics and plenty of extreme emoting, while the shooting of the film involves a showy switch between black-and-white and colour.

That’s not to say that Cooper’s performance isn’t worthy of praise in isolation, though. He nails Bernstein’s unapologetic exuberance with considerable style, regardless of that curious fake nose.

There’s plenty of subtlety to be found elsewhere on this list. Cooper’s presence represents some good old fashioned Hollywood glitz and glamour.