Top 40 Most Nomination-Deserving Never-Nominees

by Daniel Smith Rowsey

Welcome to the mother of all polls, the one you’ve been waiting for all your life. Which forty living actors deserve to become official Acting Academy Award Nominees? Not for this year’s films, but because of past snubs? You decide!

There’s nothing wrong with winning an Oscar. But as Judi Dench said, “it’s the nomination bit” that’s really special. For Frank Langella and Mickey Rourke, an Oscar would be great, but just being able to put “Academy Award nominee” next to their name means that right now they’re suddenly getting a whole different caliber of scripts. And Langella and Rourke have been doing this for a long time: they deserve that upgrade. But don’t you feel there are some other people who deserve it just as much?

Over the summer, incontention.com asked for your most-snubbed performances. This is related, but a little different. Here we ask you to consider quality and quantity of past snubs, as well as a feeling of dues-paying. Who deserves to have “Oscar nominee” on their CV?
Below find one man’s (my) Top 20 actors and Top 20 actresses most deserving of Oscar-nominee status. Now we ask you to please chime in with your own Top 20 lists. Hopefully we get enough responses that we can pool the data and come up with an awardsdaily.com Master List.

No actor under 30 years old, please. Yes we know some of them have been paying their dues (especially, God love her, Christina Ricci). They can pay a little longer.

NEVER-nominees only. If you’re not sure if someone has been nominated, just go to their imdb page. Right at the top, it says “Nominated for Oscar” (or “Won Oscar”) if they have been. If it doesn’t say it, they haven’t been.

The key qualification here is not acting ability per se. This is NOT a list of the Top 40 most talented non-Oscar-nominated actors in the world. If it were, then based on New York Times theatre reviews of the last thirty years, Betty Buckley would no doubt deserve an Oscar nomination. But she has a negligible presence in cinema – she’s earned many things, but has she really earned that particular laurel? Likewise, we all agree that James Gandolfini is quite a TV actor – but has he really earned a movie nomination? For each nominee, you should have at least one particular cinematic performance snub in mind; who knows what snarky person on the boards will challenge you to come up with *which* Bruce Willis film he should have been nominated for. It’s snubs and something else: when you see a preview and the narrator starts naming the actors, and you hear “Academy Award winner” for one and then “Academy Award nominee” for another and then you hear a name all by itself without Academy Award anything (or, egads, with mere Emmy or Tony Award credit) – how much do you want that actor to be able to claim Academy Award nominee status? Who are the living actors you feel should have had that by now?

The possibilities are literally limitless…but that’s never stopped you before…

My Top 20 most deserving actresses:

20. Frances O’Connor
19. Natasha Richardson
18. Madeleine Stowe
17. Cherry Jones
16. Claire Danes
15. Elaine Stritch
14. Audrey Tautou
13. Eileen Atkins
12. Maria Bello
11. Lily Taylor
10. Thandie Newton
9. Parker Posey
8. Gong Li
7. Isabella Rossellini
6. Maggie Gyllenhaal
5. Mary-Louise Parker
4. Jennifer Jason Leigh
3. Jean Smart
2. Isabelle Huppert
1. Charlotte Rampling

Some other possibilities for you to chew on – by no means an exhaustive list –

Brooke Adams, Jane Adams, Gillian Anderson, Jennifer Aniston, Asia Argento, Patricia Arquette, Kathy Baker, Christine Baranski, Ellen Barkin, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Beals, Monica Bellucci, Jacqueline Bisset, Sandra Bullock, Saffron Burrows, Veronica Cartwright, Kristin Chenoweth, Jennifer Coolidge, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sinead Cusack, Blythe Danner, Embeth Davidtz, Hope Davis, Julie Delpy, Cameron Diaz, Illeana Douglas, Lindsay Duncan, Jennifer Esposito, Edie Falco, Mia Farrow, Carrie Fisher, Frances Fisher, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Beth Grant, Pam Grier, Carla Gugino, Lena Headey, Linda Hamilton, Bonnie Hunt, Dana Ivey, Allison Janney, Famke Janssen, Milla Jovovich, Ashley Judd, Nastassja Kinski, Mia Kirshner, Lisa Kudrow, Jane Lynch, Andie MacDowell, Debi Mazar, Rachel McAdams, Natascha McElhone, Radha Mitchell, Gretchen Mol, Demi Moore, Emily Mortimer, Connie Nielsen, Cynthia Nixon, Catherine O’Hara, Sarah Jessica Parker, Elizabeth Peña, Robin Wright Penn, Martha Plimpton, CCH Pounder, Joely Richardson, Michelle Rodriguez, Keri Russell, Rene Russo, Meg Ryan, Greta Scacchi, Kyra Sedgwick, Fiona Shaw, Ally Sheedy, Cybill Shepherd, Brooke Smith, Juliet Stevenson, Victoria Tennant, Harriet Walter, Celia Weston

My Top 20 most deserving actors:

20. Alan Rickman
19. Kevin Bacon
18. Christopher Lee
17. John Cusack
16. Ewan MacGregor
15. Christian Bale
14. Steve Buscemi
13. Vincent Cassel
12. Mark Ruffalo
11. Jeffrey Wright
10. John Leguizamo
9. Tony Leung
8. Alfred Molina
7. Steve Martin
6. Brian Cox
5. Donald Sutherland
4. Dennis Quaid
3. Danny Glover
2. Gary Oldman
1. Derek Jacobi

And another very non-exhaustive list of alternate possibilities –

Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Auteil, Dylan Baker, Eric Bana, Antonio Banderas, Harry Belafonte, Paul Bettany, Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, David Carradine, Jim Carrey, Daniel Craig, Alan Cumming, Tim Curry, Jeff Daniels, Keith David, Brian Dennehy, Danny DeVito, Peter Dinklage, Vincent D’Onofrio, Aaron Eckhart, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sam Elliott, Giancarlo Esposito, Rupert Everett, Colin Farrell, Colin Firth, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Ben Gazzara, Richard Gere, Henry Gibson, Mel Gibson, Brendan Gleeson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, John Goodman, Hugh Grant, Bruce Greenwood, Robert Guillaume, Luis Guzman, Philip Baker Hall, Hugh Jackman, Nathan Lane, Anthony LaPaglia, Hugh Laurie, Ray Liotta, Tobey Maguire, Joe Mantegna, John Cameron Mitchell, David Morse, Cillian Murphy, Tim Blake Nelson, Terry O’Quinn, Guy Pearce, Oliver Platt, Jonathan Pryce, Sam Rockwell, Michael Rooker, Julian Sands, Peter Sarsgaard, Andy Serkis, Rufus Sewell, Tony Shalhoub, Martin Sheen, Stellan Skarsgard, James Spader, Timothy Spall, Harry Dean Stanton, Patrick Stewart, Eric Stoltz, Peter Stormare, David Thewlis, Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, M. Emmet Walsh, David Warner, Bruce Willis, Patrick Wilson, Ray Winstone

Lastly, this is your big chance for squatters’ rights. If someone in your top 5 gets an Oscar in the next few years, you can always come back to this link and say See, I Told You So. Come on, you know you want to…