{"id":339689,"date":"2026-09-07T03:38:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T03:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/339689\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T03:38:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T03:38:22","slug":"can-john-turturro-finally-land-his-first-oscar-nomination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/339689\/","title":{"rendered":"Can John Turturro Finally Land His First Oscar Nomination?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tForty years into a career that has made him one of American cinema\u2019s most recognizable character actors, John Turturro<\/a> has a Cannes best actor prize, an enviable r\u00e9sum\u00e9 and exactly zero Oscar mornings when his name was read aloud with the words \u201cand the nominees are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSony Pictures Classics is determined to end the drought with his work in the acclaimed \u201cThe Only Living Pickpocket in New York<\/a>,\u201d which premiered at Sundance last January and made its fall festival bow at Telluride<\/a> this weekend, where the film and Turturro\u2019s invigorating turn as an aging pickpocket are drawing acclaim.<\/p>\n

\n\tTurturro, 69, has been making the rounds in the Colorado mountains, attending Q&As and a Saturday night dinner hosted by Sony Pictures Classics, where writer-director Noah Segan mingled with press and industry attendees.<\/p>\n

\n\tTurturro has spent four decades operating in the space reserved for actors everyone recognizes and almost nobody thinks of as an Oscar nominee. He has worked with masters of cinema such as the Coen brothers, Spike Lee and Robert Redford and has appeared opposite everyone from Tom Hanks to Adam Sandler. He\u2019s played gangsters, professors, detectives, eccentrics, husbands, fathers and men who seem to have wandered into the wrong movie and somehow made it better.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet, the Academy has never invited him to the party.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd it\u2019s not like he hasn\u2019t been close. Turturro won best actor at Cannes for the Coen brothers\u2019 \u201cBarton Fink\u201d in 1991. Three years later, his combustible Herbie Stempel in Robert Redford\u2019s \u201cQuiz Show\u201d collected Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations, the kind of precursor support that usually precedes an Oscar bid. But each time, the industry seemed to look elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe television world has been kinder. His weary defense attorney in \u201cThe Night Of,\u201d HBO\u2019s 2016 crime drama, drew Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations. His tender, unraveling Irving Bailiff on \u201cSeverance,\u201d Apple TV\u2019s dystopian workplace thriller, has since earned him two Emmy nominations, the most recent lost to his own castmate Tramell Tillman in 2025.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Only Living Pickpocket in New York\u201d can change that.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a similar vein to Richard Jenkins\u2019 first career nomination for the 2007 drama \u201cThe Visitor,\u201d Turturro can be the overdue veteran to finally see his name in lights. Segan\u2019s Sundance breakout, acquired by SPC for a fall release, gives Turturro something four decades of great supporting performances never could: a movie that he leads, one that lives and dies on him.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe plays Harry Lehman, an analog thief operating in a city where the very concept of pickpocketing has become obsolete. Wallets increasingly contain less cash, phones have replaced maps and tickets and two-factor authentication has made the modern world almost aggressively hostile to the old-fashioned criminal. Harry is clinging to a disappearing profession while caring for his ailing wife, Rosie.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile that metaphor is hardly subtle, it\u2019s also part of its appeal. Harry is not simply a thief whose trade is dying; he\u2019s a man confronting his own obsolescence.<\/p>\n

\n\tSPC calls it the finest performance of Turturro\u2019s career. Distributor hyperbole is usually best treated as campaign copy. But here, it resonates. Turturro has never been an actor who needed to announce himself. He slips into other people\u2019s scenes, finds the detail nobody else thought to play and then, almost imperceptibly, becomes the most interesting person in the room. The Academy has rewarded that instinct repeatedly, just not when Turturro has been the person standing at the center of the frame.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs an awards campaign, the studio is following a familiar formula: a beloved, never-nominated veteran finally gets a leading role worthy of his gifts. But the strongest version of the pitch is not \u201cGive John Turturro an Oscar.\u201d It is \u201cLook at what John Turturro has been doing all along.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Academy has historically responded to overdue narratives, particularly when the performance provides a credible reason to act on the sentiment. Turturro has the r\u00e9sum\u00e9, the festival pedigree and the late-career showcase that can turn years of admiration into a voting impulse.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Only Living Pickpocket in New York\u201d is a movie about a man whose skills belong to another era, trying to prove they still have value. The meta-text is impossible to miss. Turturro\u2019s awards case makes essentially the same argument about the actor himself.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt also helps to have Steve Buscemi in the cast, who could mount his own first awards run for \u201cWild Horse Nine,\u201d along with the best awards campaigner this side of the sun, Jamie Lee Curtis, who delivers a killer one-scene wonder.<\/p>\n

\n\tLike a lot of SPC films, neither the movie nor Turturro may seem the loudest voice in the room right now and plenty of pundits will write it off early, especially once precursors start rolling in. But as the studio has shown with titles like \u201cThe Father,\u201d \u201cParallel Mothers\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m Still Here,\u201d the ground game and striking when it matters most, is what wins these campaigns.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd Turturro may not even be the film\u2019s only awards story. Segan, long a familiar face in front of the camera, wrote and directed \u201cThe Only Living Pickpocket in New York\u201d himself and a spare, mournful original like this one is exactly the kind of writer-director calling card the original screenplay race tends to reward. It happens more than voters remember. \u201cFrozen River,\u201d another SPC sleeper, paired Melissa Leo\u2019s lead nomination with a surprise original screenplay nod for writer-director Courtney Hunt and \u201cNebraska\u201d did the same for Bruce Dern and scribe Bob Nelson. If the film connects with voters, Segan\u2019s script could ride in alongside its star.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe best actor field, notably, is shaping up to be incredibly crowded. Heading into the fall festivals, pundits had already penciled in the likes of Matt Damon (\u201cThe Odyssey\u201d), Ryan Gosling (\u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d) and Sebastian Stan (\u201cFjord\u201d), and Venice and Telluride added John Malkovich (\u201cWild Horse Nine\u201d) and Andrew Scott (\u201cElsinore\u201d) to the conversation. SPC will have to make noise without overselling a performance whose appeal lies in its subtlety. But if the campaign can persuade voters to see Harry not as a novelty but as the culmination of everything Turturro has spent a career doing, the narrative becomes difficult to ignore.<\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s see if this pickpocket can steal some hearts along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forty years into a career that has made him one of American cinema\u2019s most recognizable character actors, John…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[41552,9,11,10,3057,127518,50938],"class_list":["post-339689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-john-turturro","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-oscars","tag-telluride","tag-the-only-living-pickpocket-in-new-york"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}