Best Actor 2004

1998 through 2007

Best Actor 2004

Don Cheadle - Hotel Rwanda
3
8%
Johnny Depp - Finding Neverland
2
5%
Leonardo DiCaprio - The Aviator
7
19%
Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby
19
51%
Jamie Foxx - Ray
6
16%
 
Total votes: 37

Reza
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by Reza »

Damien wrote:
Sabin wrote:
Damien wrote
My Own Top 5:
1. Liam Neeson in Kinsey
2. Topher Grace in In Good Company
3. Ethan Hawke in Before Sunset
4. Michael Pitt in The Dreamers
5. Billy Bob Thornton in Friday Night Lights
I've said it before and I'll say it again...Michael Pitt in The Dreamers?
I've said it before and I'll say it again . . . Yes! :P
Pitt's willy gave a rather subpar performance though......could have done much better !!
Damien
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by Damien »

Sabin wrote:
Damien wrote
My Own Top 5:
1. Liam Neeson in Kinsey
2. Topher Grace in In Good Company
3. Ethan Hawke in Before Sunset
4. Michael Pitt in The Dreamers
5. Billy Bob Thornton in Friday Night Lights
I've said it before and I'll say it again...Michael Pitt in The Dreamers?
I've said it before and I'll say it again . . . Yes! :P
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
Sabin
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by Sabin »

Damien wrote
My Own Top 5:
1. Liam Neeson in Kinsey
2. Topher Grace in In Good Company
3. Ethan Hawke in Before Sunset
4. Michael Pitt in The Dreamers
5. Billy Bob Thornton in Friday Night Lights
I've said it before and I'll say it again...Michael Pitt in The Dreamers?
"How's the despair?"
MovieFan
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by MovieFan »

ksrymy wrote:
MovieFan wrote:Sorry to mention this here because it doesnt seem like the thread to mention this but after the Best Actor polls are done (which will be pretty soon) are we moving onto the supporting actor ones?
We are going to do Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress 2010 polls before we move onto Best Supporting Actor polls.
Cool. Im looking forward to the supporting actress of 2010 one
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by ksrymy »

MovieFan wrote:Sorry to mention this here because it doesnt seem like the thread to mention this but after the Best Actor polls are done (which will be pretty soon) are we moving onto the supporting actor ones?
We are going to do Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress 2010 polls before we move onto Best Supporting Actor polls.
"Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by MovieFan »

Sorry to mention this here because it doesnt seem like the thread to mention this but after the Best Actor polls are done (which will be pretty soon) are we moving onto the supporting actor ones?
Reza
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by Reza »

Too many great performances were left off the list to make room for these five.

Voted for Eastwood by default.

My picks for 2004:

Liam Neeson, Kinsey
Paul Giamatti, Sideways
Javier Bardem, The Sea Inside
Jeff Bridges, The Door in the Floor
Gael Garcia Bernal, Bad Education


The 6th Spot: Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby
Jim20
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by Jim20 »

Off my 2004 Shouldabeens...

ACTOR
Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Aviator
Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby
Jamie Foxx, Ray
**Paul Giamitti, Sideways**

But voted on my second choice here, that being Eastwood.
FilmFan720
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by FilmFan720 »

My vote here goes to Clint Eastwood, who I think gives the best performance in Million Dollar Baby, and probably the best performance of his career. The only other person who I would consider is Don Cheadle, an always strong actor who finally got a nice lead role. I think he is able to overcome the typicalities of the script, and gives one of the more interesting performances of his career.

This is the opposite of Johnny Depp, who may give the most bland performance of his career. One thing you can say about Depp is that he is never boring, even when he is horrible or too far out there to be believable. Here, though, he defines the term phoning it in. I had an acting teacher who once said that their problem with Scorsese films is that everyone is always acting, and that is certainly true of DiCaprio in The Aviator...you can see him trying really hard in every frame of this film to play Howard Hughes, never being Howard Hughes.

As for the much lambasted Jamie Foxx, the triviality of the film and his obnoxious acceptance speech after acceptance speech have certainly made it easy to hate his win here. My wife teaches visually impaired students, and claims that Foxx gives one of only 2 really true performances capturing a person who is blind. She saw his mannerisms and reactions completely true to the experience of living without sight, and I will certainly agree with that. Unfortunately, his mimicry is so boring and shallow that the one good aspect to his performance is completely overlooked.

As for the ignored, Liam Neeson was my choice to win here. I also love Jeff Bridges in The Door in the Floor (a forgotten gem of a film) and Gael Garcia Bernal.
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The Original BJ
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by The Original BJ »

My top two were Liam Neeson and Paul Giamatti, and after each won a major critics award and a Globe nomination, I assumed both would make the Oscar lineup. Like many here, I adopted a fairly bitter attitude towards this race after their Oscar morning omissions.

But it wasn't just the exclusion of two performances I truly loved that soured me -- there was a whole bounty of interesting candidates left on the margins of this race. I'd probably cite Jim Carrey and Ethan Hawke for being the perfect romantic foils to their more high-strung leading ladies. But Gael García Bernal and Jeff Bridges were also quite impressive, and worthier than most of the men who were nominated.

I actually predicted that Clint Eastwood would crack the lineup, but I thought the omittee from the widely-predicted SAG roster would be Depp, not Giamatti, simply because I couldn't fathom enough voters would find anything special in Depp's sleepwalking. To me, it barely even counted as acting.

Leonardo DiCaprio at least put in some effort in The Aviator...but that's a lot of what I saw: effort. I think DiCaprio strains a bit to fit into this role -- Howard Hughes needed an actor who could command the screen with almost Orson Welles-size intensity, but DiCaprio feels more like a kid struggling to adopt this mature, outsize sense of gravitas. It's certainly superior to his dull Gangs of New York performance, but nowhere near the level of his genuinely impressive roles just ahead.

Don Cheadle is a good actor, and he probably should have earned an Oscar nomination somewhere down the line. But not for Hotel Rwanda. I think he's perfectly decent in a fairly emotional role, but I don't think his character is remotely interesting. The part pretty much amounts to a lot of intense crying, shouting, and accent-ing.

For me, it comes down to Jamie Foxx or Clint Eastwood. I do think Foxx's impersonation of Ray Charles was genuinely impressive. For about the first twenty minutes of Ray, I was quite taken with how well the actor captured the singer's gait, his manner of speech, his presence. But it didn't take long for me to realize that the rest of the performance was just going to be a lot more of the same -- the performance doesn't really show much range, variety, or depth. I don't think he's an embarrassing Oscar choice, but I couldn't believe this mostly superficial performance was such a universally adored lock to win from the minute the movie opened. And by the time we got to his standing ovation at the Oscars for basically what amounted to ONE performance (which sort of diminished the hugely-deserved career ovation Morgan Freeman had received earlier that night), I was really over Jamie Foxx.

So, partly to be a contrarian, I was rooting for Clint Eastwood on Oscar night. (Though I see this is hardly a contrarian take on this board.) I do think that Best Director was a more appropriate place to honor Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby achievement than Best Actor. And there are certainly plenty of opportunities to Oscar the man in both Picture and Director over the years. But of this year's Best Actor candidates, Eastwood created the most fully-rounded human being -- he's lovably gruff in the film's early scenes ("Girlie, TOUGH ain't enough"), light on his feet in his banter with Morgan Freeman, and, by movie's end, simply heartbreaking. His delivery of "Mo cuishle means my darling, my blood" puts me away every time. No, he's not an all-time great actor, but this was certainly one of his finest on-screen accomplishments, and I think it's the best performance nominated in Best Actor this year.
The Original BJ
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by The Original BJ »

Sorry, double post.
Last edited by The Original BJ on Sun Oct 16, 2011 8:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Damien
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by Damien »

It was a really terrific year for lead male actors, but you'd never know i from this group.

First to go is Johnny Depp. After The Village, Finding Neverland is the second worst movie of 2004 and the worst Best Picture nominees of the 21st century. another piece of unbearable heavy-handedness from Marc Forster. As presented in this film, the fascinating and very complex real-life J.M. Barrie becomes a character of no interest whatsoever, and Depp plays him in the same saccharine Man/Child manner which he employed in Benny & Joon, which one had hoped would have been an aberration, the nadir of his acting career.

Leonardi DiCaprio is a very talented actor, but the range of roles for which he is suited is limited because he looks like a very young man. He was never a convincing Howard Hughes, in that he came across as a kid playing Grown Up.

For all its violence and the awfulness of the events it recreates, I found Hotel Rwanda curiously uninvolving, a condition that’s epitomized by Don Cheadle’s performance. This excellent, often-exciting actor holds back and seems focused only on his accent; his demeanor is maddeningly passive. This feels like one of those nominations that’s for the character rather than for the actual performance.


Jamie Foxx gave a utterly competent impersonation of Ray Charles, but it remained a surface-deep impersonation. How he wom so many awards for this performance – including from the once-cutting edge National Socieety of Film Critics – remains beyond me to this day. The superficiality of the performance is analogous to the glibness of the picture as a whole.

So the only viable choice here is Clint Eastwood in one of his most heartfelt and affecting performances. There’s not a false moment from him in the entire picture and his inter-actions with the great Hillary Swank and the also great Morgan Freeman are wonderful.

I remember that back in 2005 there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over Paul Giamatti’s performance not being cited. For me, however, that was one of the few highpoints of that particular nominations day. Although I wouldn’t go quite so far as my Mom (83 at the time) who declared Giamatti to be “repulsive” in Sideways, I didn’t believe his character for a moment and found him thoroughly unappealing. (And the film a dreary slog, as Alexander Payne continued his descent into worthlessness.) No, the real injustice was that L.A. Film Critics winner Liam Neeson was not nominated for his rich and nuanced performance in Kinsey.

My Own Top 5:
1. Liam Neeson in Kinsey
2. Topher Grace in In Good Company
3. Ethan Hawke in Before Sunset
4. Michael Pitt in The Dreamers
5. Billy Bob Thornton in Friday Night Lights
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
Mister Tee
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by Mister Tee »

Well, I hardly have to speak here, as most have already articulated my thoughts on this ludicrously mis-nominated slate.

Paul Giamatti gave the year's best performance. Full stop. It's rare for a character actor to be given a full-bodied lead role like this, and Giamatti was 100% up to the task. But the movie was a comedy so, in Academy-terms, automatically inferior to half-hearted dramas like Hotel Rwanda or Finding Neverland. Plus, as Uri says, there's voter queasiness over a non-leading man -- especially a younger one -- emerging from the supporting ghetto. (They probably thought they were making it up to Giamatti a year later when they slated him for his far less interesting work in Cinderella Man. For me, it compounded the insult -- saying, Good boy; stay here and support our handsome actors, like you're supposed to)

If not Giamatti, Liam Neeson was clearly deserving, so he was, too, was unaccountably left off. After that, I favored the subtitled guys -- Gael Garcia Bernal in Bad Education and Javier Bardem in The Sea Inside. Jeff Bridges was quite good in The Door in the Floor, as well, though the film itself felt truncated. I'm afraid I can't go along with Jim Carrey -- though I loved Eternal Sunshine, I thought Carrey's performance was too glum, too "I'm not doing my usual shtik but I'm not really doing anything else, either". It was a bit reminiscent of when Whoopi Goldberg or (going back) Carol Burnett tried to play Serious by stripping their performances of all the things that usually gave audiences pleasure, but failed to create a full persona in the process.

Now, to play, by the rules, I have to choose among five performances that don't approach the ones omitted. It was basically a full slate of Sam Waterson/The Killing Fields -- leading roles in best picture contenders that failed to excite on their own but were carried along by their films' momentum.

Johnny Depp was perfectly pleasant, but utterly lacking distinction. Leonardo DiCaprio continued his post-Titanic attempt to transcend the vapid presence he'd developed under Cameron and try to recapture the real ability he'd shown as a child...but he only got maybe halfway up the ladder. Don Cheadle is a good actor, but I find Hotel Rwanda perhaps his least interesting performance -- and the film, though on an important subject, is, in art terms, the same sort of empty do-gooder project we disdain when it stars Hillary Swank.

I expected Clint Eastwood to win here, give his rabid fan base, but I'm not OK with it. I've been around long enough to see Eastwood's reputation as director grow hugely, and I can fully endorse that shift. But the corollary attempt to present him as some kind of impressive actor I can't go along with. He's, at best, a presence that works for certain roles; I've never (except maybe in In the Line of Fire) felt he was contributing anything that a better actor couldn't have improved.

Jamie Foxx may be even less than that. What he achieves in Ray is, essentially, a glorified impression. It's a reasonably effective impression -- and it holds up over two hours, which isn't that easy. But, as I said to my wife when we left the theatre, Based, on this, I may know he can re-create Ray Charles, but, I don't really have the slightest idea if he can act.

I guess push-to-shove I'd pick Foxx over Eastwood, but my actual impulse is to follow OKri and abstain, to indicate my extreme displeasure with the way this year's race was run.
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by Cinemanolis »

1. Paul Giamatti – Sideways
2. Javier Bardem - The Sea Inside
3. Billy Crudup – Stage Beauty
4. Liam Neeson - Kinsey
5. Clint Eastwood – Million Dollar Baby
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Re: Best Actor 2004

Post by Uri »

I must admit I fell asleep watching Hotel Rwanda on tv, but from what I did see of Cheadle, a good actor, he did what he had and could do with a paper thin role. Though, as I said before, I don't often get Depp, at least one must give him credit for taking chances, but certainly not here. This is a vacuum of a performance. DiCaprio in The Aviator seems like his testicles have yet to drop. And Foxx projected arrogant shallowness, both on and off screen.

So Eastwood, who's the only one on this list worthy of a nomination, is my choice too. It really should have been Giamatti, but he's ugly and not playing a villain so he had no chance I guess. I was not a big fan of Kinsy, but the acting was good and a nod for Neeson would have been nice. I'll add Bill Murray for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and off course, I wouldn't be me had I not mentioned Jeff Bridges for being great, again, this time in The Door in the Floor.
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