Oscars: Will this year’s Best Actor lineup include any lone nominees?

Since the establishment of the Academy Awards in 1929, exactly 60 films have achieved lone lead male acting nominations, meaning they were each recognized in the Best Actor category and nowhere else. The last such instance occurred in 2023 and involved “Aftersun” star Paul Mescal, who, at 26, stood out as the youngest member of a lineup consisting only of first-time Oscar contenders. Although his low-budget movie had a strong shot at an original screenplay bid and was viewed as a serious Best Picture candidate, it ended up getting no love outside the acting branch.

Before Mescal was recognized, his category hadn’t seen a lone nominee since Willem Dafoe earned his first lead bid for “At Eternity’s Gate” in 2019. This was the ninth time that four or more years separated consecutive Best Actor loners, with the single largest gap having spread between Cary Grant (“Penny Serenade,” 1942) and Clifton Webb (“Sitting Pretty,” 1949). Such nominations appear to be becoming less common in this category, as there have only been eight examples (and no more than one per year) since 2008.

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The record for most lone Best Actor bids in a single year is four, as set in 1930 and matched only in 2007. In the earlier case, George Arliss, Maurice Chevalier, and Ronald Colman were each simultaneously nominated for two performances and thus essentially had one foot apiece in the loner camp (as the stars of “The Green Goddess,” “The Big Pond,” and “Condemned”) alongside Lawrence Tibbett (“The Rogue Song”). The winner that year was Arliss, albeit specifically for Best Picture and Best Screenplay nominee “Disraeli.”

In 2007, Forest Whitaker (“The Last King of Scotland”) triumphed over fellow lone nominees Ryan Gosling (“Half Nelson”), Peter O’Toole (“Venus”), and Will Smith (“The Pursuit of Happyness”) as well as Leonardo DiCaprio (“Blood Diamond”). He is the most recent of five Best Actor winners who started out as lone nominees, following Emil Jannings (“The Way of All Flesh,” 1929), Jose Ferrer (“Cyrano de Bergerac,” 1951), Cliff Robertson (“Charly,” 1969), and Michael Douglas (“Wall Street,” 1988). Ferrer is the only one in that group who was also his lineup’s sole loner.

O’Toole happens to be the only three-time lone Best Actor nominee in Oscars history, as he is also credited with the sole bids that went to “The Ruling Class” (1973) and “My Favorite Year” (1983). Those who accomplished the feat twice each are Laurence Olivier (“Richard III,” 1957 and “The Entertainer,” 1961), Viggo Mortensen (“Eastern Promises,” 2008 and “Captain Fantastic,” 2017), and Denzel Washington (“The Hurricane,” 2000 and “Roman J. Israel, Esq.,” 2018). Olivier also became a lone Best Supporting Actor nominee in 1977 thanks to his work in “Marathon Man.”

Aside from Mescal, Dafoe, Washington, and Mortensen, the only other lone Best Actor contender from the past decade was Bryan Cranston (“Trumbo,” 2016). Gold Derby’s official 2024 Oscar nominations predictions indicate that there won’t be a new one this year, with Golden Globe nominees Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers,” seventh place) and Barry Keoghan (“Saltburn,” ninth) being the likeliest new additions to the roster.

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