Who are these not so well known Oscar nominees?

While everyone is justifiably making a huge deal out of Meryl Streep receiving her twenty-first Academy Award nomination in 2018, there are several artists inching close to or past their tenth nomination this year that you've probably never heard of. They're sound designers, costumers, set decorators and visual effects artists, and the movies you love wouldn't be nearly as magical without them. Outside of the numbers game, there are also nominees in major categories bound to prompt a "Who's that?" In all of these cases, these "unknowns" are some of the most respected artists in their field, and it's high time that moviegoers have a names and faces and a little biographical background to put to this exceptional work.

She won Best Actress (Musical or Comedy) at the 2009 Golden Globes for Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky," and earned over a dozen Best Supporting Actress nominations for Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine," but Sally Hawkins still isn't the star she deserves to be. That's all changing with her brilliant turn as a mute janitor who falls for a mysterious (but, let's face it, dead sexy) amphibian creature in Guillermo del Toro's "The Shape of Water." Even if she doesn't win, she taught us all ASL for a profane kiss-off, and that makes us all winners.

Simmer down, British readers and cultured types. Some of us have known and loved Lesley Manville since her early collaborations with filmmaker Mike Leigh; a lucky few got to watch her blossom even earlier than that on the West End as one of the most exciting stage actresses of her generation. Alas, she’s only now getting her due in America via her Oscar-nominated supporting role as the formidable fashion house manager Cyril Woodcock in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.

This up-and-coming young actor is a real peach. Chalamet impressed as Matthew McConaughey's son in 2014's "Interstellar," but he made some real noise on the New York theater scene as the lead in John Patrick Shanley's 2016 production of "Prodigal Son." He found his way into Greta Gerwig's sensational "Lady Bird" as a privleged-and-pretentious high schooler, but his 2017 was all about "Call Me By Your Name." As a teenager crushing on his dad's graduate assistant (Armie Hammer), Chalamet torched movie screens and broke hearts in Luca Guadagnino's coming-of-age instant classic.

The veteran composer became a fast favorite of film buffs as the Coen brothers’ go-to scorer dating all the way back to their first feature, "Blood Simple" (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Inside Llewyn Davis” are the only Coen films he’s sat out). His preference for riffing on preexisting musical material cost him Oscar nominations in the past (the Academy demands a certain percentage of the score be entirely original), but he’s been meeting that threshold for years. He was nominated in 2015 for “Carol” and again in 2018 for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

If you like to sit through a film’s end credits, Doug Hemphill should be a familiar name. This is the sound mixer’s ninth Academy Award nomination (he shares this one with Ron Bartlett and Mac Ruth), and, according to IMDb, his 174^th credit contributing in some capacity to a film’s aural impact. His got his first official credit as a mix recordist thirty-nine years ago on “Apocalypse Now,” and received his first nomination in 1991 for “Dick Tracy.” He hasn’t won since 1993 (for “Last of the Mohicans”), but may have a shot this year with one of 2018’s most technically impressive movies.

Born into a Hollywood “sound family,” Gregg Landaker had only a handful of sound mixing credits to his name when he won his first Oscar for “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back.” He’s since racked up over 200 credits and two more Oscars (for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in 1982 and “Speed” in 1995). “Dunkirk” (for which he’s heavily favored to win) makes it nine nominations total for one of the most respected soundmen of the modern moviemaking era.

Nominated for his sixth Oscar in 2018, Dennis Gassner got his start as a graphic designer at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios on films like “One from the Heart” and “Rumble Fish.” He made the leap to production designer on the 1986 cult horror flick “The Hitcher,” and began a long stretch of collaborations with the Coen brothers in 1990 with “Miller’s Crossing.” He received his first two Oscar nominations in 1992 for “Barton Fink” and “Bugsy,  winning for the latter. He hasn’t won since, but has a solid shot this year with “Blade Runner 2049” (alongside co-nominated set decorator Alessandra Querzola).

Double nominees Sarah Greenwood (production designer) and Katie Spencer (set decorator) are up this year for the fantastical “Beauty and the Beast” and the far more grounded Winston Churchill biopic “Darkest Hour,” the latter marking their fourth nomination as a design team for director Joe Wright. These are their first nominations since 2013’s “Anna Karenina,” and, given stiff competition from “Blade Runner 2049” and “The Shape of Water,” it does not appear they’ll be winning an Oscar this year.

French director of photography Bruno Delbonnel made a splash in 2002 with his work on Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fanciful “Amelie,” earning his first of now five Academy Award nominations. He’s back this year with the subdued “Darkest Hour,” and “subdued” is typically not the path to Oscar glory in any category, especially cinematography. It appears Delbonnel will go home empty handed again, but if he keeps collaborating with Academy faves like Joe Wright and the Coen brothers, the sixty-one-year-old DP won’t be Oscar-less for long.

He’s come a long way from designing threads for “Waxwork II: Lost in Time.” Mark Bridges broke out of the direct-to-video horror ghetto in 1997 with his gloriously garish 1970s and ‘80s duds for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights.” He was previously nominated for Anderson’s “Inherent Vice,” and is back with the filmmaker in 2018 for the couture-themed “Phantom Thread,” for which Bridges is heavily favored. If he is awarded the Oscar, it would be his second win after taking home Best Costume Design for 2011’s “The Artist.”

Six-time nominee Jacqueline Durran is another designer whose fortunes have surged with Joe Wright’s emergence as an Oscar darling – even though he’s yet to actually win a trophy for himself. Durran won in 2013 for “Anna Karenina,” and, like her Wright sisters Greenwood and Spencer, finds herself double nominated for “Darkest Hour” and Bill Condon’s “Beauty and the Beast.” Theirs is one of the most closely-knit design teams in filmmaking today, and its been paying off in awards recognition since 2006’s “Pride and Prejudice."

Film editor Lee Smith got his start as a cutter in the 1980s on Ozploitation classics like “Turkey Shoot” and “Dead End Drive-In” while also apprenticing on decidedly more artful filmic output of Peter Weir (“The Year of Living Dangerously” and “Dead Poet’s Society”). Smith’s hard work on a lot of not-so-great trash like “Howling III” and “Robocop 2” paid off in 2004 when he received his first Academy Award nomination for Weir’s epic “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.” He later became Christopher Nolan’s editor of choice, earning his second nod in 2009 for “The Dark Knight.” His third nomination, for the temporally tense “Dunkirk,” is expected to be the charm.

Editors Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos were there for the start of Edgar Wright’s directorial career on the British TV series “Spaced,” and reunited with the filmmaker for “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” in 2010. They’ve been racking up the editing awards from critics associations with their musically precise cutting on Wright’s “Baby Driver,” and dazzled enough Academy members to earn their first Oscar nomination this year.

Andy Serkis rightfully gets showered with praise for his groundbreaking performance-capture work as Gollum, King Kong and Caesar, but it takes two to bring these virtual characters to life, and visual effects artist Joe Letteri is the other half of this brilliant collaboration. This is Letteri’s tenth nomination in fifteen years dating back to his first nod and win for co-creating Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.” He won a bonus Technical Achievement Oscar for this in 2004, and is seeking his fifth competitive win in 2018 for Caesar’s swan song in “War for the Planet of the Apes.”

Soundman Julian Slater has been knocking around the industry for over twenty-five years since getting his start on the satirical British news shows “The Day Today” and “Brass Eye.” After a series of collaborations with Mike Figgis that began with “Leaving Las Vegas,” Slater hooked up with upstart filmmaker Edgar Wright on “Shaun of the Dead,” and has worked on all of his features ever since. After being inexplicably passed over for his sound design heroics on “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Slater finally scored his first two Oscar nominations for design and mixing on “Baby Driver."

This is probably the last year the Broadway songwriting duo of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will qualify as “lesser known.” They won their first Oscar in 2017 for the “La La Land” ditty “City of Stars,” and are poised to repeat with their infectiously uplifting “This Is Me” from 2018’s surprise hit “The Greatest Showman”. Get used to these guys. They’re currently writing new songs for Guy Ritchie’s “Aladdin” and the in-development live-action rendition of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Lebanese-born Ziad Doueiri got his first movie credit as an electrician on the 1987 Harvey Korman-toplined “Gremlins” knockoff “Munchies."  Thirty-one years later, his emotionally charged Middle-Eastern courtroom drama “The Insult” is nominated for Best Foreign Film. To be clear, he did some quite noteworthy work between “Munchies” and “The Insult” as a camera operator on “Reservoir Dogs," “Pulp Fiction” and “Under Siege.” He also earned critical acclaim for prior features “West Beyrouth,” “Lila Says” and “The Attack.”