The British movie Atonement debuts in the U.S. in December. In the U.K., it has already been making waves, with many predicting that it could provide Keira Knightley with her second Best Actress Oscar nomination (her first was for Pride and Prejudice in 2006). Certainly, there are several factors that are likely to endear the movie to Academy voters: It’s an adaptation of a prestigious novel, it’s set during World War II, and it features a tragic romance (between Knightley and James McAvoy, star of Becoming Jane). It’s also very finely directed, and it deserves to be well received. But if they do start handing out Oscar nods for the performances, I hope there’ll be one in there for Romola Garai.

Garai is a young British actress who has yet to achieve the breakout success of Knightley, although she’s been on my radar for about as long. While Keira was appearing in Bend It Like Beckham in 2002, Romola was starring in the BBC’s adaptation of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, as Gwendolen Harleth, the beautiful, spoiled, willful heroine.

Her classic looks were combined with a natural acting talent, and it wasn’t long before she graduated to the big screen — showing her range by starring as the imaginative, bookish Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle (2003).

Whether scribbling frantically in her journal, plunging into an icy-cold lake for a midnight swim, or tragically apostrophizing her sister Rose, played by Rose Byrne (“No towel in the world is worth marrying a bearded man you hate!”), Cassandra was one of recent cinema’s most likeable, as well as most intelligent, heroines. The fresh, uninhibited quality of Garai’s performance, as well as her English Rose beauty, soon had critics comparing her to a young Kate Winslet.

Two Hollywood productions, Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights, and the Reese Witherspoon version of Vanity Fair, followed, although they both — and particularly Dirty Dancing — received lackluster reviews. That didn’t stop Woody Allen from casting Garai in his 2006 film Scoop, as the British best friend of Scarlett Johansson’s Brooklyn-born Sondra Pransky.

When I first saw the trailer for that film, I wondered if Garai and Johansson within the same screen might be a bit more blonde bombshell than I could handle. Particularly given that the trailer features Garai telling Johansson: “You know, you’re a very attractive, sexy girl. You’d better watch out.”

I like to think the two actresses agree with me that Allen would have done a much better job casting Johansson opposite Garai as her love interest, rather than opposite Hugh Jackman.

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“You see Scarlett, what Woody doesn’t realize
is that this would be a much better film if we were a couple.”

“You’re so right, Romola. I’ve never thought of it that way before.”

In Atonement, Romola stars as the 18-year-old Briony Tallis, sister of Knightley’s Cecilia, whom Briony hopelessly alienated five years ago by accusing her boyfriend (McAvoy) of a crime. While Knightley has the more showy role, as the glamorous love interest, Garai is quietly excellent as Briony, a prickly and complicated girl who will go on to become a famous writer.

In an interview given at the film’s U.K. premiere, director Joe Wright recalled preparing a key scene with the two actresses, whose characters are meeting for the first time after five years.

“I asked Romola what her character was thinking, and she gave me a very long, thought-out, intellectual response about the position of women in the period, and so on. And then I asked Keira what her character was thinking [about Romola’s character], and she said ‘She’s grown tits!’”

Here’s hoping the Academy will realize that both Knightley and Garai’s approaches — different as they apparently are — have their strong points.