Rosario Dawson
What Should She Have Been Nominated For? With a career that’s spanned indies, blockbusters, prestige fare, TV, and sometimes just crap, Rosario Dawson has felt kind of omnipresent for 20 years now without ever really coming close to Oscar recognition. The actress has been an obviously huge talent since “Kids,” and while that movie was never going to be on Academy radars, she could have, and maybe should have, figured in for her turns in “25th Hour” and even “Rent.” Her best work has come more recently, though: sShe was phenomenal in Danny Boyle’s unfairly unloved “Trance,” and simply terrific in Chris Rock’s “Top Five,” a movie that briefly got awards buzz without ultimately going anywhere, and in which she elevated a part that could have felt like a trope. Dawson’s only getting better with age, though, so we live in hope.
Will It Happen? Though she’s seemingly going to be spending some of the next few years doing the Marvel/Netflix thing, that does leave plenty of room, so we certainly hope so.
Anthony Mackie
What Should He Have Been Nominated For? Now a big star thanks to his Marvel appearances, Anthony Mackie’s been slogging away for a while before he got famous, and has racked up more than a few performances that deserved more attention, awards-wise. Putting aside all the various movies where he’s played cops or FBI agents, and his good performance in Spike Lee’s otherwise questionable “She Hate Me,” we’d particularly highlight “Half Nelson,” in which Mackie exploded off the screen as a manipulative, insidious drug dealer; and obviously Best Picture winner “The Hurt Locker,” which Mackie damn near steals from under Jeremy Renner. But while the movie got nine Oscar nods, Mackie wasn’t among them.
Will It Happen? Unless he’s lost completely to the MCU, we hope so: Mackie’s been developing projects like a Jessie Owens biopic (likely killed by the upcoming “Race,” but still), so he certainly seems to be working towards it.
Hope Davis
What Should He Have Been Nominated For? We’ve double- and triple-checked and it’s official: Hope Davis has never been Oscar-nominated, despite appearing regularly in the kind of (usually supporting) roles that the Academy looks fondly on. She probably came closest to a nomination with “American Splendor,” which certainly saw her recognized at many of the precursor awards, and her performance as Jack Nicholson‘s exasperated, soon-to-be-married daughter in “About Schmidt” is the other one that really feels like it ought to have been noticed, though co-star Kathy Bates soaked up the Supporting Actress kudos there. But she’s reliably excellent, from “Infamous” to “Synecdoche, New York” to “The Hoax” to “Charlie Bartlett” to her recurring role on TV with “In Treatment,” ever since her breakout roles in indies “Next Stop Wonderland” and “The Daytrippers,” both of which saw her co-stars (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Stanley Tucci respectively) go on to the kind of success she fully deserves.
Will It Happen? Davis hasn’t taken many film roles recently, being involved instead in TV (“Wayward Pines,” “Allegiance,” “The Newsroom“), so it might not happen for a while, but we can’t believe it never will.
Jeff Goldblum
What Should He Have Been Nominated For? Almost impossibly tall, and moving and talking like no other human being alive, Jeff Goldblum is one of cinema’s most singular presences, but he’s always done kind of whatever the hell he feels like, and ‘getting an Oscar nomination’ doesn’t seem to be very high on his list, favoring mostly small supporting roles for people like Wes Anderson (when he’s not blockbustering, at least). But there’ve been a few major opportunities to nominate the great star that the Academy overlooked: first, with his great leading turn in David Cronenberg’s “The Fly;” and more recently, Paul Schrader’s “Adam Resurrected.” The film, in which Goldblum plays a circus clown who survived the holocaust, is in some respects ill-conceived and messy, but it’s also fascinating, in large part thanks to a staggering, against-type turn from the actor.
Will It Happen? If Goldblum ever decides he’s interested in such a thing, maybe — all it would take would be for Wes Anderson to give him a larger role than usual.
