The Woody Awards: Best Actor

BEST ACTOR
My Nominees:
George Clooney, Up in the Air
Sharlto Copley, District 9
Tom Hardy, Bronson
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker
Sam Rockwell, Moon

Oscar Nominees:
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
George Clooney, Up in the Air
Colin Firth, A Single Man
Morgan Freeman, Invictus
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

This category was NOT easy to narrow down to five nominees, and that's not even including performances in movies I've seen since I made the initial nominee list (Colin Firth in A Single Man) and some performances in movies I still haven't seen which I suspect would have been strong contenders if I had (Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, Matt Damon in The Informant, and Viggo Mortenson in The Road, just to name a few). But even among the movies I have seen this year, I had to leave out some really great performances - such as Adrien Brody in The Brothers Bloom, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in (500) Days of Summer, and John Krasinski in Away We Go. All that being said, the difficulty I've just described of narrowing this category down should tell you just how terrific each of the performances that made the list is.

George Clooney, Up in the Air

George Clooney is the perfect choice to play Ryan Bingham, the smooth-talking guy who lives his life out of his suitcase and flies from city to city firing people. Actors don't come much more charming than Clooney, and it is charm that is his character's most vital asset. Clooney takes a character who could, played by the wrong actor, become unlikable very quickly, and makes him not just likable, but even, at times, relatable. His delivery of the film's quick, smart dialogue is perfect, and he projects exactly the kind of confidence that a character who spends his days firing people he's never met before (and actually kind of likes it) requires.

Tom Hardy, Bronson

Of all my nominees that failed to get nominated for the actual Oscars, I find it most surprising that the Academy overlooked Tom Hardy's performance as real-life British prisoner Charles Bronson. Maybe he wasn't eligible for technical reasons (you never can be sure with the stunningly arbitrary rules the Oscars abide by), but this is the kind of performance that Oscar voters typically love - an up-and-coming actor playing a controversial and interesting real-life figure (Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July, Denzel Washington in Malcolm X, and Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line are just a few of countless examples). But putting all that aside, Tom Hardy is phenomenal in this film. He creates a violent yet charismatic character, and he completely commands the audience's attention for every second he is onscreen. He does not come across as an actor who has studied and is imitating the voice, mannerisms and body movements of a real person, but as a totally insane man who just happens to have been caught on camera.

Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

While I wasn't as blown away by The Hurt Locker as a lot of people were, Renner's performance as Sergeant William James is undeniably great, and it is that very well-crafted performance that makes this movie work. While The Hurt Locker is an action/war movie, it is also a character study of a cocksure explosives expert who has found the one thing in life that he is absolutely brilliant at doing, and who pursues that one thing almost like an addiction. He uses a brash over-confidence to hide the deep need he has developed to continue doing the one thing at which he excels. This film would not be nearly as affecting if Renner wasn't able to bring such a lifelike quality to his character.

Sharlto Copley, District 9

This is Sharlto Copley's feature film debut, and his performance in this movie is better than anything many of our most well-known actors have done in years. He plays a flawed, imperfect character with such realism that the viewer never doubts for a second that he is anything but a low-level corporate bureucrat telling a documentary crew about his work. What is truly amazing is the fact that Copley's ability to maintain that same level of realism never wavers as the film departs from the documentary-style beginning and introduces its more fantastical plot developments. Copley, as Wikus van de Merwe, feels like an everyday guy from the beginning of the movie to the end, and the audience can feel his fear and desperation for every second of it. Rather than giving the audience a traditional hero, Copley portrays an unpolished character who is mostly just interested in his own wellbeing and who sometimes does the wrong thing. Copley's performance is so fantastic that I had a really hard time deciding who to choose for Best Actor, and he is a very close runner-up to...

THE WINNER: SAM ROCKWELL, MOON

(SPOILER ALERT - In order to discuss Sam Rockwell's performance in Moon, I'm going to have to give away a few plot details, but nothing that happens beyond the first thirty minutes of the film. So if you don't want to know anything at all about what happens in this movie, skip the following and just know that Moon is one of the best movies of 2009, and Sam Rockwell is fantastic in it. That being said, I'm not going to give anything away that will ruin the movie for you - the development that I'm talking about is really just the setup for the main plot of the film, and I think it may have even been revealed in the trailer.)

If ever there was a movie that hinges upon one actor's performance(s), Moon is it. And Sam Rockwell delivers. In what is actually not just one, but two great performances, Rockwell creates a believable character, then creates another take on that same character, and watching his two versions of the same character interact with one another is fascinating. Rockwell truly carries this movie singlehandedly - he is the only actor that appears actually onscreen for more than a few seconds in the entire film, with very minor support coming from actors who appear in brief video messages to his character and Kevin Spacey as the monotonal voice of the base's computer/robot. But I am not praising Rockwell simply for the fact that he is virtually the only actor in the movie. It is Rockwell's brilliantly nuanced performance that makes what could have, in the wrong hands, been a very boring concept not just a compelling character study, but a fascinating science fiction mystery.