Best Actor 2012

Who among the Oscar nominees is your coice for Best Actor of 2012?

Bradley Cooper - Silver Linings Playbook
5
16%
Daniel Day-Lewis - Lincoln
13
42%
Hugh Jackman - Les Misérables
1
3%
Joaquin Phoenix - The Master
12
39%
Denzel Washington - Flight
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 31

mojoe92
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by mojoe92 »

I went with Bradley Cooper

My choices for Best Actor

1- John Hawkes - The Sessions- ( The true winner of this award)
2- Bradley Cooper- Silver Linings Playbook
3- Emile Hersch- Killer Joe
4- Ethan Hawke- Sinister
5- Omar Sy- The Intouchables

Alternatives
1- Daniel Day Lewis- Lincoln
2- Joaquin Phoenix- The Master
3- Frank Langella- Robot & Frank
ITALIANO
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by ITALIANO »

Any Best Actor race where it's between Daniel Day-Lewis and Joaquin Phoenix, both more or less at their best by the way, can't be bad, even if the other three nominees don't do anything especially interesting or inventive. Day-Lewis is predictably very good, though both his performance and the movie itself belong to Paul Muni territory - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I think that Paul Muni was a talented actor. But - you know - intelligent, respectable, and not very exciting. Joaquin Phoenix - who has never won an Oscar and never will - is my pick.
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by Mister Tee »

Yeesh, I've fallen behind here.

Lavant certainly shows his versatility in Holy Motors, but for the most part he (properly) stays behind a mask, which prevents me from loving his work. John Hawkes is a sadder miss for me, and Trintignant the most grievous of all -- he might well have won vote outright had he been nominated.

The waste-of-space is Hugh Jackman. Nice guy no doubt, but a rather ordinary performance, and, as has been pointed out, he doesn't even sing all that well. Plus, did anyone believe he was as old as he was supposed to be?

Denzel Washington made me remember, for about 90 minutes, that he used to be a real actor -- finding fascinating shades in a character who was bad/good in alternation. Then the writer/director sabotaged him with a sanctimonious, utterly unmotivated fade-out scene. A shame; I hope next time he finds a script that lets him go all the way.

The highest compliment I can pay Bradley Cooper is to say, that from the moment he appeared on screen, I didn't think of him as That Guy from the Hangover or that pill-popping sci-fi (whatever it was called); I just saw a completely convincing leading actor. Silver Linings Playbook is obviously a divisive item around here, but I land firmly on the pro side, and Cooper's lead performance is one of the primary reasons.

But for me, like for most, it comes down to the major work done by the other two. Joaquin Phoenix has great performances in him -- I'll think we'll see incredible things from him in the years just ahead. And his lead role in The Master is probably his best to date. If I shy away from choosing him, it's primarily because of my disappointment with the film's script, especially in the final half hour or so. It seemed to me Anderson worked Phoenix to a position where what he was doing should have come together in a fascinating way -- but, instead, at a certain point he had him (literally) drive off into the sunset (on his motorcycle), and Phoenix never truly returned; never got to tie his character together and bring narrative or emotional closure. I consider Phoenix for what he DID achieve -- and am really pleased he made the nomination cut, after the SAG snub. But I can't quite vote for him.

Especially because of what Daniel Day-Lewis did. I understand where Eric's coming from: the narrative that Lincoln was routine biopic redeemed by extraordinary acting really sold Kushner, at minimum, short -- and the worst thing about it is, this conventional wisdom set in even before the film had been seen, thanks to the bloggers. Mostly because of this, back in December/January, when I was still in my "seen no films" cocoon, I was rooting Phoenix on at the critics and prelims. But then I finally saw Lincoln, and had to, dammit, admit that Day-Lewis had simply topped my expectations (as had Lincoln overall, which separates my opinion from the CW). He seemed to be working from a different center of gravity than what I'd seen in any other performance of his -- capturing Lincoln's wit, his homespun quality, his gentleness, and also his political acumen, all this while seeming to barely raise his voice. He held the screen more by presence and dignity than any attention=getting histrionics. This was just a great piece of acting that, for me, stood out above a pretty strong (3/5) field of nominees and several notable omittees (with Trintignant, as I say, his strongest challenger -- and I'm glad I don't need to make that choice).
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by Sabin »

Jackman aside, one of the great lineups. I don't love Denzel Washington's work in Flight but I think he's quite good, just rather let down by the material. I happen to think he's one of our best movie stars so I don't incredibly mind another nomination to his already impressive tally for six career nominations. It came at the expense of John Hawkes for The Sessions, but robbed were Jack Black for Bernie, Denis Lavant for Holy Motors, and Jean-Louis Trintignant for Amour. Although I think Day-Lewis and Phoenix are the class acts, there are times where I think Bradley Cooper is extremely underrated in Silver Linings Playbook and the film is unimaginable without the balance that he strikes. Yes, it's a "Special" performance but it's a terrifically funny piece of work going from exposed nerve to brilliant comedy moments apart.

Both Joaquin Phoenix and Daniel Day-Lewis give instantly great performances but I fall into the Day-Lewis camp for reasons I've probably said a week ago at this point.

Best Actor
1. Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
2. Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
3. Denis Lavant, Holy Motors
4. Jack Black, Bernie
5. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Amour
(very close runners up: Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook, Mark Duplass in Your Sister's Sister)
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by bizarre »

Bradley Cooper / Silver Linings Playbook
Joel Edgerton / Wish You Were Here
* Logan Lerman / The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Channing Tatum / Magic Mike
Jean-Louis Trintignant / Amour
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by ksrymy »

1. Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
2. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Amour
3. Denis Lavant, Holy Motors
4. Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
5. Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook

6. John Hawkes, The Sessions
Last edited by ksrymy on Sat Dec 14, 2013 11:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by Big Magilla »

The Original BJ wrote:To respond to OscarGuy's gripe, I don't think that anyone here would say, I CLEARLY prefer Performance X, but I'm going to pick the much worse Performance Y because I've already voted for X. But...I think when two performances are very close in quality, and it can be difficult to decide on a winner, I don't see why multiple past votes for one candidate can't be a factor.
Precisely. In fact previous wins or non-wins are often the deciding factor at the Oscars and other awards. The bar is usually higher for previous winners than for non-winners and rightly so. I much prefer the spread the wealth of the Oscars to the give it the same people over and over again approach the Emmys have taken for far too long.
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by Sabin »

It's a certainly honor to be nominated, but it's also a consolation if you're up against Daniel Day-Lewis. Or for merit's sake, Joaquin Phoenix. Stately brilliance vs. Cray-cray brilliance. And in the middle is Bradley Cooper, giving the kind of holiday offering prestige rom-com perf that pushed Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson near or in the winner's circle and he's miles better than both. Certainly somebody out there thinks he doesn't deserve to goose egg! #votedfordaylewis
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by The Original BJ »

A great year for leading men. I would have loved to see Jean-Louis Trintignant join his costar on the ballot, and given how surprisingly well (to me, at least) Amour did on nomination morning, I wonder how close he came to making the list. John Hawkes's less dominant work wasn't as much of a must-have for me, and given which nominee may have benefited from his exclusion, I wasn't crushed he missed the lineup...but he gave a solid, detailed performance, and was certainly superior to...

...Hugh Jackman, the one nominee on this list that I think pretty clearly doesn't belong. It's true that many actors have played Jean Valjean on screen before, but even MORE actors have played this role on stage, and every single one of those I've seen (and it's a solid number) were vastly superior to Jackman. I was completely baffled by the acclaim he received for this role. Russell Crowe got a lot of (deserved) brickbats for his singing, but I didn't think Jackman's was all that much better -- he strains to hit the role's high notes, and even good portions of the songs that are within his limited range are talk-sung. And acting-wise, I saw very little depth or variety in his choices, and thought his one-note misery grew tiresome very quickly. By all accounts he's a hell of a nice guy, but I'm not ready to give him an 'A' for effort here.

I think the other four nominated men are all very strong, to varying degrees. Flight was a bit of a spotty movie -- I loved the frightening opening plane crash, and thought the narrative flirted with some genuinely interesting addiction issues, but I also felt the script was bogged down by unnecessary subplots and an overly sanctimonious finale. But this was Denzel Washington's best performance in a long time, capturing the grueling physical and emotional effects of alcoholism but with some bite, unafraid to show his character's arrogant streak. Of course, the movie lets him down at the end -- that speech in the prison just reeks of unfortunate "lessons learned" -- but I still think the actor's commanding work really elevates the movie and pushes it into some more interesting directions.

I'd liked Bradley Cooper on Alias, but other than that I was mostly familiar with his work from junk like The Hangover, and didn't necessarily view him as any deep actor. But I thought he was terrific in Silver Linings Playbook, portraying his character's condition with both heft and humor, without ever turning the more comic aspects of his situation into jokes at his character's expense. I think this is an exceedingly well-rounded performance, and a lot of the tension in the movie rests on the fact that at any moment, Cooper and Lawrence could go from having a great time to exploding at one another. I don't think he's quite the powerhouse that the remaining two men are, but I'm now very much looking forward to seeing more of his performances in the future.

To respond to OscarGuy's gripe, I don't think that anyone here would say, I CLEARLY prefer Performance X, but I'm going to pick the much worse Performance Y because I've already voted for X. But...I think when two performances are very close in quality, and it can be difficult to decide on a winner, I don't see why multiple past votes for one candidate can't be a factor. Having voted for the great Daniel Day-Lewis twice in the past, I don't feel any urgency to reward him yet again. I would DEFINITELY consider him, especially because what impressed me most about his work here was just how different it felt from his more dominant/outlandish Gangs of New York/There Will Be Blood roles. His Lincoln is warm, controlled, and with a humorous streak, and his lovely performance -- humanizing the iconic president by bringing out his less outsize qualities -- provides a perfect contrast to Spielberg's visual approach, which plays up the mythologization of Lincoln as legend. It's an outstanding performance, and one that would have easily received my vote in the handful of years leading up to this one.

But the performance that really blew me away was Joaquin Phoenix's in The Master, as the bold, tragic antihero searching for something to believe in, self-destructing as he goes. The scene with Hoffman in which he has to keep his eyes open as long as possible is one of the greatest acting moments of last year, a blistering scene that makes the viewer not want to blink for fear of missing a moment of it. I've liked Phoenix well enough as an actor in the past, but never before have I felt that he immersed himself in such a striking way into a character as thorny as this one. The Master is a hugely ambitious movie, and one that doesn't always congeal its elements in the most dramatically satisfying way possible. But it works perhaps best as a fascinating character study of Phoenix's Freddie Quell, and the actor delivers tremendously with the year's most dynamic performance. He gets my vote.
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by Reza »

Phoenix.
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by mlrg »

OscarGuy wrote:This is just my opinion but: this whole "I've already awarded him or her twice" thing just seems disingenuous. Either they were the best of the year or they weren't. Awarding someone else a prize because someone has been over-rewarded doesn't mean they were the best, it means you're being egalitarian. Vote for someone as many times as you want. If they were the best, then so be it. Vote for them 16 times if you feel froggy.
I agree with you, and if you read my post carefully you see that I voted for the most complex (best) performance given by any actor last year.
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by OscarGuy »

This is just my opinion but: this whole "I've already awarded him or her twice" thing just seems disingenuous. Either they were the best of the year or they weren't. Awarding someone else a prize because someone has been over-rewarded doesn't mean they were the best, it means you're being egalitarian. Vote for someone as many times as you want. If they were the best, then so be it. Vote for them 16 times if you feel froggy.
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by mlrg »

Daniel Day-Lewis is masterful in Lincoln, but I already awarded him twice, so I voted for Phoenix whose performance is the most complex given by any actor last year.
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by Eric »

I'd rank DDL's performance behind TLJ, Sally Field and maybe even Hal Holbrook among Lincoln's performances, at the same time admitting that the way the Oscar narrative around the movie (i.e. titanic performance caught in a mundane, by-the-numbers biopic) developed definitely left a foul taste in my mouth. Maybe in a year or two when some of the movie's insulting losses -- specifically the screenplay one -- have faded, I'll feel differently and again rank Day-Lewis as highly as the rest of the world did. For now, though, this is Phoenix's award, as much in tribute to the should-be-legendary performances that preceded it (Two Lovers, I'm Still Here/real life).

But 2012 was Denis Lavant's year, without question, with special honors going to Paul Rudd's mirror monologue in Wanderlust.
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Re: Best Actor 2012

Post by Cinemanolis »

1. Daniel Day Lewis - Lincoln
2. Jean Louis Trintignant - Amour
3. Joaquin Phoenix - The Master
4. Dennis Lavant – Holy Motors
5. Phillip Seymour Hoffman - The Master
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