Penélope Cruz became an Oscar winner when 2008’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” made her the first Spanish actress to win an acting Oscar. Seventeen years later, she is not chasing a second statuette so much as choosing which vehicle to ride to the ceremony — because this season she has three. The biggest of the three isn’t even her largest role.
Los Javis’ “La Bola Negra” — the Federico García Lorca-inspired epic that shared the best director prize at Cannes, drew a near-record ovation on the Croisette and sold to Netflix in a bidding war — is shaping up as the streamer’s marquee awards title of the year. Cruz surfaces in it as a bawdy cabaret singer, a role the size of a cameo that critics off the Croisette and now here at Telluride have already tagged a scene-stealer. In Olivia Wilde’s A24 dinner-party comedy “The Invite,” which opened over the summer, she has another scene-stealing part opposite Edward Norton, a second potential route into the supporting actress race.
And then there is “Bunker,” Florian Zeller’s follow-through on the promise of “The Father,” which bows in Venice competition Sept. 8. Zeller wrote it for Cruz and her real-life husband Javier Bardem — their eighth film together — and built it around a marriage of 17 years, roughly the length of their own. Cruz plays the wife whose disillusionment becomes the story’s emotional core, opposite Bardem as an architect drawn into building a survivalist bunker for a reclusive tech billionaire.
Sony Pictures Classics, which turned “The Father” into a six-nomination contender that won two — best actor for Anthony Hopkins and adapted screenplay for Zeller himself — is lining up a lead actress run after Venice and Toronto, and even betting Bardem can land in best actor beside her, making “Bunker” a two-front campaign before Cruz’s other films enter the frame. The genuinely unprecedented possibility is what happens if both supporting turns (and lead) catch fire — because this is the first season it even could. Earlier this year, the Academy rewrote one of its oldest acting rules.
Beginning with this year’s 99th Academy Awards, a performer can land two nominations in the same category, provided both performances finish among the top five in nominations voting. For decades, the lower vote-getter was simply erased. Cruz is the marquee test case — Variety war-gamed this exact scenario when the rule changed.
It helps that all three films are already mounting serious campaigns of their own, quite apart from Cruz — buzz she can borrow without having to manufacture it, and dip into when she feels like it, not because she has to. But it can also set a trap. The same rule that makes a double nom possible makes vote splitting potentially fatal for a campaign.
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