The 97th Academy Awards are quickly approaching, and the actors nominated this year encompass a wide range of impressive performances. Several movies were strong enough to score two acting nominations: ( and ), (a surprisingly Oscar-less and ), ( and ), ( and ), and the controversial and generally less acclaimed ( and ). Two films even have a chance to win three out of the four acting Oscars this year: (, , and ) and (, , and ). It's kind of strange to see A Complete Unknown get so many, given the fact that it's much more interested in rushing into musical performances than telling a story or giving its cast compelling character arcs to work with. But, in any case, aspiring actors would do well to study these performances.
No movie has ever won Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress, but there are three movies that came close. It's an astounding feat in itself, and not every entry has avoided controversy over its inclusion on this prestigious list. It seems that the shortlists this year are too strong to expect The Brutalist or A Complete Unknown to win three out of these four categories. However, history has shown us that luck plays just as big a role as merit here, so you never know. Below are the three unique films that have the honor of declaring themselves the most well-acted movies in cinema history (according to the Academy), Instead, they're ranked by how much of a chance they had at bringing home all four acting Oscars.

is by far the most recent film to get nominated for three of the four Best Acting Oscars. Unlike the other two entries on this list, however, this one had no shot of getting all four: it didn't receive a nomination for Best Actor. Intriguingly, it did receive two nominations for Best Supporting Actress: one for , and one for . Curtis wound up winning for her role as the unfriendly IRS employee Deirdre Beaubeirdre, which has gone down as one of the most controversial Oscar wins and notoriously obvious career wins of all time. Curtis has had a great career with far superior roles that deserved nominations she didn't get, so this win (which was also her first nomination) came across as making up for that. Many would say that even Hsu deserved the Oscar over Curtis, though there's an argument to be made for the other actresses, too.
As for the other categories, 's win for Best Actress was also her first Academy Award nomination—which seemed as overdue for her as for Curtis. Unlike Curtis's win, however, Yeoh's performance felt just as substantial and worthy of the prize as those of her fellow nominees—including in and in (which was at the center of another Oscar controversy). won for Best Supporting Actor in one of the most acclaimed acting wins of the century so far, overcoming two worthy nominees from ( and ) and more. In the end, Everything Everywhere All At Once had a lot of momentum going into the 95th Oscar ceremony—which was especially impressive because it had been released almost exactly a year prior. Like , it proved that movies released early in the year can still score very well with the Academy.

Mathematically speaking, 's pitch-perfect satirical masterpiece had the best chance at winning all four acting Oscars. It clinched a nomination in each of those categories, and actually had two Best Actor nominations: one for , and one for (which the latter rightfully won). That didn't necessarily make things easy for them, though, as those two had to go up against 's unforgettable turn as Travis Bickle in and in the widely beloved Best Picture winner, . In the meantime, the great had solid Best Actress-competition from (as Adrian in Rocky) (as Carrie in , and in one of 's later works. surprisingly also came up on top when put up against the likes of a sensational in Carrie and in Taxi Driver (which made Foster one of the youngest Best Supporting Actress nominees ever). Given that she only has very little screen time in the movie, Straight's win (as great as she is) is considered one of the biggest Supporting Actress upsets by many.
lost for Best Supporting Actor, but that's not surprising when you take a look at that shortlist. The Supporting Actor category in 1977 was very intimidating: there were two fantastic performances from Rocky ( as Paulie and as Mick), as well as one from the legendary himself (for ). Interestingly, Beatty wound up losing to for his turn as Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee in . Though Beatty couldn't have been better, the talent on display in the 70s makes it a shock that any movie was able to snag three of the four Best Acting Oscars.

Network
- November 27, 1976
- 121 Minutes

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by none other than , the main roles would be played by actors who had already performed them on stage. , , and Karl Malden were all in the original Broadway play, while Viven Leigh was in the London theater production. The 24th Academy Awards were historic, as Streetcar was the first movie to win three Oscars in the acting categories, an accomplishment it held on its own for another 25 years. If any of these movies were going to win all four acting awards, Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire should've been the one.
It's hard to imagine someone beating Kim Hunter for best Supporting Actress, but Karl Malden had to go up against two actors from Quo Vadis (though it's not much talked about nowadays, it was a huge commercial success at the time). Vivien Leigh went up against the likes of Shelley Winters and Katharine Hepburn for Best Actress, though Leigh's performance as the tragic Blanche DuBois is indeed the greatest of them all. Ironically, the actor who received a nomination but lost gave arguably the most acclaimed performance of them all: Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. Up against performers including Montgomery Clift and Frederic March, Brando lost to Humphrey Bogart's turn in a film that's nowhere near as famous as Streetcar: The African Queen. To be fair, The African Queen and A Place in the Sun have both been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Meanwhile, Death of a Salesman was also based on a masterpiece, as Streetcar was, though it hasn't endured in the public consciousness as a film. Maybe it shouldn't have been considered a shoo-in, but Brando's revolutionary performance is much better remembered than its competition all these years later. Together, these performances made Streetcar one of the best stage-to-screen adaptations ever—and the best chance of a movie winning all four acting Oscars for who knows how long.
NEXT: 'Every Movie to Win the Big Five at the Oscars, Ranked'