His span between nominations — 42 years since 1980’s Ordinary People — is the longest of any acting contender in history, an honor that speaks volumes to Hirsch’s durability over decades.

Short Role: 8 Minutes

And his eight-minute supporting performance, short but explosive, as The Fabelmans‘ life-changing Uncle Boris ranks as one of the briefest to ever make the final bracket.

Hirsch holds that his character is one we’ve seen before in many Spielberg movie.

“Steven likes to say that this is one of his only films that doesn’t have an alien in it,” Hirsch recently said. “Or an animal or a robot or whatever, a dinosaur. And I said, ‘No — I’m that! It does include one.'”

The Fabelmans, nominated for 7 Oscars, including Best Picture, is one of its director’s most personal works, autobiographical and set in the American West of Spielberg’s 1950s and ’60s boyhood.

But Hirsch’s Boris, a shady Eastern European figure from his family’s past — an ex-circus performer and silent-movie-era survivor — sweeps into the household like a force of nature and leaves a young boy changed for good.

“I’m going to play an oracle,” Hirsch says, “a man who is somehow brought in. You don’t even know why or how or when. He’s brought in to do something to Steven Spielberg as a child, as a teenager, and then leave.”

Boris sees in young Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) a kindred spirit, another person crazed and obsessed with making art.

Hirsch’s says his costar Michelle Williams identifies the theme of the movie as the impulse that makes a person leave home to follow their heart.