This Valentine’s Day, T asked five writers to compose a love letter (of sorts) to an actor or fictional character who has been nominated — or, in one case, passed over — this year for the 91st Academy Awards. Here, the writer Andrew Martin, whose novel “Early Work” was published last year and whose first collection of stories is forthcoming in 2020, discusses Ethan Hawke’s performance as the pastor Ernst Toller in “First Reformed” and makes the case that it’s worthy of nomination.

“O.K., no one deserves an Oscar nomination,” I thought, bereft, upon not seeing Ethan Hawke’s name among this year’s best actor nominees. And given the fact that this year’s leading contenders seem to have been nominated mostly for their ability to look a lot like the famous people they’re portraying, maybe it’s better that the year’s best actor didn’t get nominated for his performance in “First Reformed,” the year’s best movie. It’s probably nobler to be overlooked completely than to suffer in direct comparison to some guy’s facial prosthetics.

“And,” I thought to myself, “‘First Reformed’” is about religion, and it’s very upsetting, and people have complicated feelings about Paul Schrader — I can understand why the academy might have been reluctant to give it too much attention.” But typing the words “religious” and “upsetting” and “complicated feelings” led me to googling “ridiculous Mel Gibson war movie Oscar nominations?” and I was reminded that “Hacksaw Ridge” — remember “Hacksaw Ridge”?! — was nominated for six Oscars, including a nomination for Andrew Garfield, who looks even more like a half-starved woodland creature than Hawke. At that point, I resigned myself to the all-too-obvious conclusion that I’d been avoiding: Ethan Hawke got robbed, and I was sad about it.

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Ethan Hawke is wonderful, and I’m glad most people (the academy excepted, though I’m sure they’ll come around when he plays a scarily accurate Mike Pence in a turgid “satire” of the Trump administration in 2028) now agree with me about that. He’s always been best when playing charismatic sleazebags, whether that involves passive aggressively singing a Violent Femmes song at Winona Ryder in “Reality Bites,” wandering disconsolately through a Blockbuster Video to a voice-over of himself performing the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in “Hamlet” (2000) or being a little too excited about normcore period Wilco in “Boyhood.” His most recent roles — as the terminally depressed Rev. Ernst Toller in “First Reformed” and as the violent ne’er-do-well Lee in the current Broadway production of “True West” — have allowed him to fully graduate from bad boy to bad man. Before, he was the annoying, handsome dude you put up with because he had good drugs and knew some cool people; now, he can pull off the scary dude who keeps insisting he used to know cool people and demanding you owe him drugs. In “True West,” Hawke looks big. Maybe he’s carrying himself differently than he does onscreen, lumbering and lolling and generally taking up space while bullying Paul Dano all over the stage. I saw the show before he got snubbed by the Oscars, but he was already playing the part like somebody working through rejection, like a clumsy bear destroying the circus that wouldn’t have him.