Another Oscars means another movie year wrapped and another chance to quibble with the Academy’s choices. The Oscars are far from perfect, but they’re useful precisely because they allow us to argue about the year in film.
Sometimes, though, they get things right, and when they do, they help us remember the year’s best work in everything from sound editing to acting. Not every acting winner is immortalized, but we’ve pulled together this list of the 10 best acting winners of the past 10 years in Best Actor and Best Actress and compiled them into two lists, one for actors and one for actresses. In general, the actress category was stronger with a few repeat winners. Check out the full lists below:
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5. Leonardo DiCaprio – The Revenant (2015)
DiCaprio has undoubtedly given better performances than the one he delivered in The Revenant, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t good in the movie. DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a trapper who is betrayed and left for dead. He then braves the Canadian wilderness and seeks his revenge.
The movie is at least as much about how much DiCaprio endured physically as it is about the emotionality of his character. The movie’s final moments, when Glass has achieved his mission and is left to reckon with what comes next, are haunting and entirely worth remembering.
4. Will Smith – King Richard (2021)
Will Smith’s slap heard round the world understandably overshadowed his performance in King Richard, which is quite good. Although the movie elides some of the more difficult aspects of Richard Williams’s life, Smith is excellent as an acerbic, difficult man who understood how much potential his daughters had to be genuinely great.
When Richard gets the chance to see his daughters succeed, it’s just as moving as it should be. Smith is a generational movie star, and with King Richard, he proved that he could really act too.
3. Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea (2016)
Casey Affleck’s performance in Manchester by the Sea is among the more challenging on this list. Affleck is playing, essentially, a wreck of a man. He’s been utterly destroyed by life and by one specific tragedy that broke his entire family in half.
Playing a man who is that empty, unable to feel anything, is an enormous challenge, but Affleck knows exactly how to find the truth behind a man who used to be one kind of person and became something totally different in a single moment. It’s a brilliant, devastating performance.
2. Cillian Murphy – Oppenheimer (2023)
Cillian Murphy’s win felt inevitable throughout the 2024 season and with good reason. His central performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer is in part riveting because the movie spends so much of its time trying to reckon with the personal beliefs of the man who invented the atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer’s opposition to nuclear proliferation, even in spite of his central role in the existence of nuclear technology, is fascinating, as is the scientist’s long-standing flirtation with the Communist Party. Murphy underplays almost everything, but that only makes the moment when his facade starts to crack all the more riveting.
1. Anthony Hopkins – The Father (2020)
It was a win widely known because it was a trophy that many people expected Chadwick Boseman to win posthumously. Hopkins wasn’t even in attendance, but his performance in The Father is nonetheless absolutely worthy of the awards attention it received.
Playing an aging man suffering from dementia, Hopkins is equal parts curmudgeonly and heartbreaking as a man who is slowly but surely losing his grasp on reality. The movie’s final scene, which is a total emotional breakdown, is gutting, and that’s thanks chiefly to Hopkins.
5. Brie Larson – Room
Brie Larson’s career hasn’t taken off in the years since she won this award, but Room showed us all of her acting capabilities. Playing a woman who was kidnapped as a teenager and forced to live in a small room, Larson explores all of the trauma and pain that would come with that experience, even as she is also the mother to a son she had while locked in that room.
Room is a remarkable adaptation of a riveting novel, and Larson is a huge part of why the movie works as well as it does.
4. Emma Stone – Poor Things
Emma Stone has won two actress Oscars in the last 10 years, and her more impressive performance came in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. Stone plays Bella Baxter, a full-grown woman with the brain of a newborn baby who slowly comes to understand the world for its beauty and horror.
A remarkably funny, physical performance that seems almost completely fearless, Stone proved that she could do basically anything when she decided to take on this role. Poor Things is a little long in the tooth, but Stone’s performance is impeccable and completely worthy of her second Oscar.
3. Frances McDormand – Nomadland
Another actress who won two Oscars over the past 10 years, Frances McDormand’s naturalistic performance in Nomadland is the one that landed her on this list. As Fern, McDormand plays a woman who lives in a van and travels the country because of her economic insecurity and her decision to hide from the life she once led.
McDormand is surrounded for most of the movie by actual van-dwellers, and she seems like a natural among them, creating a subtle, lived-in performance that deserves every bit of recognition it receives.
2. Michelle Yeoh – Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Michelle Yeoh has been proving for decades that she is one of the best actresses in the world, and Everything Everywhere All At Once finally gave her the perfect showcase. Playing the owner of a small laundry business in Los Angeles, Yeoh is a woman filled with regret and hates everything about her life.
As she learns about the existence of the multiverse and realizes how important she might be in saving it, though, she begins to appreciate the beauty of her small, mundane life, even if it’s not what she originally hoped for herself.
1. Olivia Colman – The Favourite
One of the great Oscar wins not just of the past decade but of all time, Olivia Colman was not expected to take home a trophy for The Favourite, but that’s exactly what she did, beating out Glenn Close for The Wife. Colman’s Queen Anne is a little deranged, deeply hilarious, and way more tragic than you might have expected.
All three performances in The Favourite are excellent, but Colman is at the center of everything, a queen overwhelmed by her duties and her desire to find someone who will love her. Colman’s win was surprising, but given how great she is, it shouldn’t have been.
