Three Films With La Bola Negra, The Invite, Bunker

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. Now both can stand. 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. If Cruz’s support scatters across two films, neither performance may crack the top five and if concentrated on one, she could be deemed far safer. However, push too hard on both and she risks walking away with nothing, where a single campaign would have guaranteed her a seat.

The burden falls on three distributors, not one.

Sony Pictures Classics will carry the lead in “Bunker”; Netflix and A24 hold the supporting hopefuls, each with every incentive to protect its own contender rather than share the road. They can coordinate in ways that serve Cruz — or quietly compete for the same Oscar oxygen.

For Cruz, the best case is that the films read as complementary rather than rivalry.

Netflix is not treating its one like a cameo showcase. The company has handed “La Bola Negra” the longest exclusive theatrical window in its history — 47 days in theaters from Oct. 16 before it streams Dec. 2, past even the run it once gave “Marriage Story” — the surest tell that it intends a full best picture campaign, not a token qualifying run. It is likely Netflix’s spearhead this year, as the Cannes conqueror the awards team has been waiting for and that is the muscle that can uplift even a supporting cameo into the race. It doesn’t hurt that Toronto is handing Cruz a Special Tribute Award as the film makes its North American rounds, another plank in a recognition narrative Netflix is glad to build upon.

There is a bigger story underneath, too. “La Bola Negra” is a Spanish-language epic Netflix is pushing to the front of the field and Cruz has long been the international face Academy voters know best, and this season she sits at the center of a Spanish-language surge pressing into the awards conversation on its own terms as a cultural dimension her résumé alone never carried.

And then we have the question about the second Oscar itself.

Cruz has already done what most actors spend a career chasing when she won the Oscar in 2009. However, there was a bit of an asterisk many felt since Kate Winslet, who had swept the circuit for “The Reader,” was shockingly moved to lead by the Academy where she ultimately won. Wouldn’t it be great to do a proper seasonal long coronation on one of the most astounding and talented international performers? A second win would place her in the small circle of performers with multiple acting Oscars in supporting actress. Only two — Dianne Wiest (“Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Bullets Over Broadway”) and Shelley Winters (“The Diary of Anne Frank” and “A Patch of Blue”).

But the most interesting story may be the simplest. Cruz has spent a career refusing to be any one thing in the movies. And now, she is refusing to be in any one category.