11 Unexpected Actors Who Might Win Oscars Next Year

11. Adam Sandler - The Meyerowitz Stories

The Role: Details are thin on the ground right now, but Sandler will play a member of an estranged New York family who are convening for the career retrospective of the family's patriarch, an artist named Harold (Dustin Hoffman). It seems reasonable to assume that Sandler's playing the son of Hoffman and Emma Thompson.

Why He Might Win: For starters, Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha) is an excellent writer-director, and so this should be a rare meaty role for Sandler, closer to Punch Drunk Love or Reign Over Me than, well, Jack and Jill.

Sandler usually only takes these serious dramatic roles when he has something impressive to contribute, so it's easy to be excited.

Why It's Unexpected: Sandler seems perfectly content sticking to his terrible made-for-Netflix movies for the most part, so to see him working with a stupendous talent such as Baumbach is hugely encouraging, even if it's not likely to be a trend moving forward.