The one category that stood out from the rest during this year’s awards season was best actor. The sheer quality, quantity and diversity of candidates were such that even doubling the number of nomination slots wouldn’t have make justice to all the deserving ones. Among them, career best performances by Channing Tatum as the Olympic wrestler in ‘Foxcatcher’ or John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as the veteran gay couple whose comfortable life takes a turn for the worst after getting married in ‘Love Is Strange’.
Register changes as extraordinary as they were unexpected from Ralph Fiennes and his comic turn in ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ or Joaquin Phoenix druggy, hippy PI of ‘Inherent Vice’, next to such memorable moments as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s swansong role as Le Carre’s spy of ‘A Most Wanted Man’; Jack O’Connell’s violent young inmate of ‘Starred Up’; Brendan Gleeson’s priest under death treat in the dark tragic comedy ‘Cavalry’; Haluk Bilginer’s pompous retired intellectual turned owner of a secluded hotel in ‘Winter Sleep’ or Pierre Deladonchamps’ falling for the dangerous appeal of a mysterious man appearing on a cruising site where killings begin to happen in ‘Stranger By The Lake’ and last, but not least, Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar frontrunner, impressive Stephen Hawkins impersonation in ‘The Theory Of Everything’. Any other year all of those actors could have easily earned not just nominations, but the actual prizes.
The outstanding works that made our final shortlist were