Oscars ‘Daily Bite’: Charting Alicia Vikander’s rise from newbie to nominee

When Alicia Vikander attended the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2012, she was one of “10 Actors to Watch” alongside Adam Driver, Domnhall Gleeson, Nate Parker and others. Since then, the Swedish actress has appeared in 10 films and is now in the race for the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Six of those films were released in the U.S. last year alone. Vikander narrated a documentary, “Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words,” which received only a very limited release here. She also went largely unnoticed in “Seventh Son,” a fantasy film starring Jeff Bridges, which is probably just as well given its terrible reviews.

Another film Vikander may prefer to forget is “Burnt,” an overdone drama starring Bradley Cooper as a bad-boy chef. (Vikander played his onetime girlfriend, Anne Marie.) She fared better as a tricky agent in Guy Ritchie’s spy-thriller “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” and turned in a more serious performance as the author Vera Brittain in the World War I drama “Testament of Youth.”

One of her best-reviewed films of past year was “Ex Machina,” a sci-fi thriller in which she played an intelligent cyborg (opposite her Hamptons traveling companion Gleeson). That film is up for two Oscar nominations, best original screenplay and best visual effects. Vikander earned a Golden Globe nod for the role.

Still, her shining moment so far has come in “The Danish Girl.” Vikander plays the wife of Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), a male-born artist who become one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery, in the early 1930s. Vikander seems likely to win the Oscar over more famous names like Kate Winslet, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rooney Mara.

Win or lose, Vikander is slated to appear in possibly four more films next year, including the Matt Damon vehicle “Jason Bourne.”