If you’ve heard anything about Call Me by Your Name, which screened to a packed audience at the Toronto Film Festival this morning, it’s probably not about Michael Stuhlbarg. An intensely romantic and sexy story, starring chiseled-from-marble Armie Hammer and incandescently youthful Timothée Chalamet, it’s full of so many gorgeous, memorable moments—The lake! The piano! The peach!—that the man playing the bearded, amiable father could have slipped through the movie largely unnoticed.

But then he has his scene. Not the final scene in the movie, but it feels like it—featuring a monologue that, without spoiling anything, sums up the enormous emotion of the movie (depicted thus far mostly in images and action) in simple, loving, fatherly words. Other movies about youthful romance might use a flash-forward, or a character’s inner monologue, to put the whole thing into a broader context. Call Me by Your Name just needs Stuhlbarg’s words, delivered in such a straightforward way that you don’t realize the emotional wallop until the scene is over.

Stuhlbarg’s role up to that point is fairly small, as any parent’s might be in a story of a teenager falling in love. A professor living with his French wife in northern Italy on an estate rich in fruit trees and ponds and leisurely lunches, Stuhlbarg’s character could seem academic and remote. But he brings warmth to his briefest scenes, and an obvious affection for the son at the center of the story.

It’s a story of same-sex love, set in 1983, but Call Me by Your Name avoids so many doom-and-gloom tropes of the genre; Chalamet’s Elio is confused and out of place, but there’s never any sense of harm that would come to him by embracing his true feelings. That sense of safety comes from Stuhlbarg—and it not only gives Elio the confidence to express himself but also gives director Luca Guadagnino room to create a lush love story that’s about pain but only the kind achingly familiar to anyone who’s ever felt the heart’s absence.

That final scene makes Stuhlbarg’s essential role in the story clear—and it leaves the audience walking out of the theater thinking about him. Which could be the key to keeping Stuhlbarg in the conversation as the great machinery of awards season lumbers to life. He and Hammer will both be campaigned in the supporting categories, with Chalamet in lead, which puts Stuhlbarg at something of a disadvantage, since he has the smaller and far less flashy role. (At the center of the story, Hammer and Chalamet are both remarkable, and completely deserving of the full awards push they'll each receive as well.)

But Stuhlbarg has the Scene, the one you can imagine being played as the Oscar clip at the ceremony in March—and the one any viewer will instantly recall when seeing Stuhlbarg’s name on a shortlist or "For Your Consideration" mailer.

Supportive Father Figure is less of a hoary Academy trope than Supportive Wife, but it still has a strong history—think Christopher Plummer in Beginners, or Mahershala Ali just last year in Moonlight. Stuhlbarg also has an excellent fall ahead to boost his case, with roles in both Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Steven Spielberg’s The Post. It’s possible that Call Me by Your Name might not even be Stuhlbarg’s best performance of the year. But nearly a decade since his breakout role in A Serious Man, Stuhlbarg’s moment for Academy recognition seems to have arrived. And if Call Me by Your Name continues to be as well-received as it had been since its rapturous Sundance premiere, this movie may just be the one to get him over the finish line.