Oscars 2019: 13 Biggest Acting Snubs

For one reason or another, this just wasn't Damien Chazelle's year at the Academy Awards.

After becoming the youngest director in history to win Best Director for La La Land a few years back and that film subsequently sweeping a good half of the awards, many were predicting that his follow-up, First Man, would achieve a similar level of Oscar glory. Yet, things went strangely quiet on First Man after its premiere in October and it wound up essentially getting snubbed altogether, aside from a few well-deserved Sound and Visual Effects nods.

Perhaps the biggest casualty of all of this though is the one-two powerhouse duo of lead performances the film featured. Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy as Neil Armstrong and Janet Armstrong, respectively, anchored this film in brutal emotion and pain. Gosling's stoic performance was the definition of restrained, playing a long-game that led to cracks slowly emerging in his stone-face over the course of the film. This led to every release of pain, such as his sobbing at the funeral of his daughter or his final confrontation with Janet before leaving, feeling gargantuan and affecting.

Meanwhile, Foy plays Janet as a character desperately trying to keep the disparate pieces of her family's life together even as it is all seemingly falling apart. She gets great showy moments, such as the immortal "You're a bunch of boys playing with balsa wood!" but also some incredibly impactful quieter moments, such as the scene where Neil leaves her at a funeral and she has to get a ride home from their friends, keeping up the facade that everything is okay all the while.