Oscars 101: Best Actor

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

Bradley Cooper - American Sniper
Michael Keaton - Birdman
Steve Carell - Foxcatcher
Benedict Cumberbatch - The Imitation Game
Eddie Redmayne - The Theory of Everything

Best Actor has been a point of great contention since this year's crop of nominees were announced last month.  That was mostly because of the omission of David Oyelowo's groundbreaking turn as Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma which - combined with Ava Duvernay's lack of a Best Director nomination, Paul Webb's lack of a Best Original Screenplay nomination and Carmen Ejogo's lack of a Best Supporting Actress nomination - prompted the #OscarsSoWhite backlash that's been all the rage for socially conscious and media savvy cinephiles in recent weeks.  But while his snub is easily one of the most blatantly egregious of the year, Jake Gyllenhaal's turn as the sociopathic Lou Bloom from the incessantly creepy Nightcrawler is the definitive snub in this category for 2014.

Bradley Cooper in American Sniper - In any weaker of a year, Bradley Cooper would have been a strong contender for Best Actor.  This is the 39-year-old actors third acting nomination in the last three years, proving that he has consistently energized the Academy with his selection of roles an innate skill at bringing them to life on screen.  Not only are based-on-real-life characters a popular choice for category winners (8 of this century's Best Actor nominations have been based on actual people), he's doomed to be the Julianne Moore of Best Actors: outclassed on every side by virtually all of his fellow nominees (and by a few notable snubs as well).

Although not in my personal acting lineup for the year, it cannot be understated just how exceptional of an actor Cooper is and what a tremendously gripping performance he gave in this film.  I doubt that the Academy will lose too much sleep over passing him over this year, especially with the certainty that he will be back again (probably as soon as next year).

Michael Keaton in Birdman - There was a time where Michael Keaton was the go to actor for everything from action to comedy.  Between Batman, Beetlejuice, Multiplicity and Mr. Mom, he earned both critical and popular notoriety for his combined raw talent and unusual taste in off-beat roles.  And then he was gone - having disappeared seemingly overnight, relegated to minor voice-over work alongside Mark Hamill.

Birdman saw him simultaneously return to form and shatter the mold of our expectations for him.  His energetic performance in the film, which so closely mirrors his life I cannot possibly believe that the part wasn't tailor made for him personally, brought him back to the forefront of critical and popular discussions after decades of seeming exile.  This is without a doubt Keaton's race to lose.  Only a majorly unprecedented upset by one of his fellow nominees will keep him from the Oscar that he so rightfully deserves.

Steve Carell in Foxcatcher - Although much has been made of Carell's performance as the utterly insane millionaire John du Pont, I can't bring myself to humor him with the vaguest shot of winning the Best Actor race.  His dark, unnerving and transformative role - although certainly excellent - wouldn't even make my top five of the year (and wouldn't beat Cooper besides that).  And, when all is said and done, it perplexes me to think that Carell's side-role is considered more of a lead performance than Channing Tatum's Mark Schultz, who unquestionably drove the narrative to its ultimately tragic conclusion.

The thing about Foxcatcher is that it's not just one centrally strong performance with narrative sinew enough to string it into a film, but an engrossingly fatalistic, uncomfortably intimate and rewardingly subtle interplay between its three chief players.  It's not Ray, Capote or even Lincoln; its place in cinematic history will be owed to more than just one performance (and the weakest of the three, at that).

Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game - The one thing keeping Benedict Cumberbatch squarely out of the Oscar limelight for his turn as the coldly brilliant professor Alan Turing - other than Michael Keaton - is his age.  As I have previously mentioned, the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences prefer to wait for young actors to prove their worth over an entire career than to acknowledge a performance from a novice actor in the nascence of his career.  For all of his indisputable skill and unrivaled popularity, he is still a young and critically untested actor up for his first Academy Award.  In the eyes of the Academy, that will probably be enough.

There is no question in my mind that Cumberbatch will live to compete for another Oscar.  His performance as the father of modern computers is brilliantly intoned with nuance and insight into the kind of man that he was and the personal injustices that drove him to commit suicide at the age of forty-one.  It is further reassurance that Marvel chose an indispensably talented actor to be their new Doctor Strange.  Given time, he will doubtless become an Oscar regular.

Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything - If any actor has a hope of upsetting Michael Keaton's Oscar certainty, it's Eddie Redmayne.  His transformation into the crippled Professor Hawking is so absolute that it took every once of my being to remember that it was a fictional production - not a documentary - that I was witnessing.  Like Ellar Coltraine, it's actually not one but a plurality of performances that he gives throughout the film: a new one for each stage of Hawking's muscular degeneration, forcing him to communicate more and more through subtle facial expressions.

Redmayne's detractors have argued that his performance is derivative of Daniel Day-Lewis' in My Left Foot.  And while there are some striking similarities between the two, to be sure, they are as different from one another as any one man  with a remarkable ailment is from another.  Redmayne also has the benefit of acting in a much better film than Day-Lewis, even if the performance itself is a shade less skillfully wrought.

Safe Bet:  Michael Keaton in Birdman

Long Shot:  Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything

Longer Shot: Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game

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