Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

1. Ulrich Muhe - The Lives of Others
2. Jeremie Renier – L’Enfant
3. Peter O’Toole - Venus
4. Sebastian Koch - The Lives of Others
5. James McAvoy – The Last King of Scotland
6. Forrest Whitaker - The Last King of Scotland

Forest Whitaker - The Last King of Scotland

I agree with Sabin on Gosling, you can see the effort in a lot of his performances sometimes but he is the best here in my opinion. Its his most natural and spontaneous performance

I've liked Forest Whitaker for ages. He's especially good in Ghost Dog and was perfect as Charlie Parker in Bird. And he was unfairly undervalued in The Crying Game. But in The Last King of Scotland, he gives a superficial two-note performance (charming/charismatic Idi Amin & spooky/crazy Idi) in a superficial one-note movie. All those awards for this performance was a big head-scratcher for me.

Will Smth was competent in a less-than competent movie.

Leonardo DiCaprio gave a wonderful performance in 2006. Unfortunately, it was in The Departed and not the picture for which he was nominated. He's all wrong in Blood Diamond. You don't buy this boy-man's accent, his back story or his macho/action hero moves.

Ryan Gosling's low-keyed performance in Half-Nelson is very fine; it's imbued with small physical gestures that reveal volumes about the character. (But Anthony Mackie is even more impressive in the picture.)

Venus is really not the movie which you want Peter O'Toole to have an Oscar for, but even though his character's not as charming as the filmmakers seemingly intended, O'Toole is elegant, charismatic and vibrant and is the best of a not-great group.

My Own Top 5:
1. Lino Ventura in Army Of Shadows
2. Kazunari Ninomiya in Letters From Iwo Jima
3. Toby Jones in Infamous
4. Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed
5. Nathan Lopez in The Blossoming Of Maximo Oliveros

I went to a sneak preview of Blood Diamond and the minute Leonardo DiCaprio opened his mouth, I thought “Oh, he’s pretending to be South African to sneak past the person who stopped him.” Then he kept speaking in that accent again and again, and I started to realize that Leonardo DiCaprio was indeed supposed to be playing South African. Now, I have not seen the finished print. It is possible that they re-dubbed some of his dialogue to make them more palatable, but I doubt enough to make that role any kind of feasible. Leonardo DiCaprio is not the chameleon he thinks he is, and for the life of him he cannot pull of roles that require accents like that. Now for whatever reason, Boston accents lend well to movie stars. His performance in The Departed is probably the best of his career and the film’s success would be unthinkable without his trembling center. Everyone around him is swaggering their dicks around, and here is Leonardo DiCaprio deep undercover and trying to maintain.

Warner Bros not only had Blood Diamond AND The Departed, they also had Letters from Iwo Jima. This was one of their stronger years. Why they chose to release Blood Diamond at all that year is beyond me, but their gambit paid off and Edward Zwick’s incredibly mediocre film walked away with five nominations…just as many as Martin Scorsese’s Oscar winner! Although there were several non-nominated turns that could have conceivably filled his spot (I don’t understand why Aaron Eckhart wasn’t in the final five), Best Actor was a very soft year. Rather than pushing Matt Damon AND Leonardo DiCaprio for Lead, and Nicholson and Wahlberg for support (as well as the rest of the stellar ensemble, including a great performance by Alec Baldwin), they decided that everyone was supporting in The Departed in a desperate bid to get DiCaprio in for Support AND Lead, and likely push for him to win in Support. The result was a nomination for Blood Diamond that could not possibly translate to a win and a nomination for Wahlberg in Support that could not possibly translate to a win. I maintain that if they had just pushed DiCaprio for Lead for both films, he could have possibly beat Forest Whitaker.

Forest Whitaker is the kind of fantastic actor you would never pinpoint for a win down the road. He’s too quietly dependable. So it’s only fitting that he wins the Oscar for likely the worst performance of his career. The Last King of Scotland is a very boring movie which a commendable performance by an underappreciated actor that holds the film together…and it’s not Forest Whitaker. James McAvoy does some very strong, superlative work in the film. Forest Whitaker bounces from quietly menacing gaze…to uproarious laughter…to losing his shit. He gives the worst Best Actor-winning turn of the decade.

The other three are all fine. Peter O’Toole is lovely in Venus, an unchallenging, undistinguished piece of work that has been widely forgotten and never really had a chance at winning him his first competitive Oscar. It also has one of the worst poster campaigns in memory. He’s perfect fine in the role. Better is Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness, a piece of dubious Ameri-corn that pulls off a neat hat trick of aligning the audience very successfully with Smith’s Gardener. With its cloying title and stunt casting, I went in ready to hate. And out I left, very deeply moved, and it’s all due to Will Smith a movie star of little range with a reservoir of talent he opts very rarely to use. Like O’Toole, I can’t say he’s very deserving of an Oscar for the kind of work he’s doing here, but I think this is a very underrated nomination.

The only acceptable choice for me is Ryan Gosling for Half Nelson, which has a conceit that is just as cloying as The Pursuit of Happyness but Fleck and Boden manage to subvert our expectations at pretty much every turn. It’s a wonderful film about choices and gradual understanding. I think the most interesting choice was the decision to have Ryan Gosling’s inner-city middle school teacher as an out of his gourd blowhard who spouts abstract nonsense so above his students heads that they do not know how to react. There is no crumbling-in-the-classroom scene. In fact, just about every obvious choice one could imagine from such a story Fleck and Boden opt out of. And yet, their choices wouldn’t be worth much if the casting wasn’t there. The film has three great performances by Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie, and Ryan Gosling. All deserved nominations, but Gosling’s work was really something. He’s a very mannered, self-conscious actor and this role is the perfect fit because he is so occupied by the stakes set in the film that he doesn’t have a chance to come across as obnoxious. As unimpressed as I was by his work in Drive and Blue Valentine, I am that much more by his amazing work in Half Nelson. He has a great team behind him, but every choice he makes seems utterly organic and spontaneous. It’s the best nominated performance of the year, and I am pretty amazed that the critic’s awards lined themselves up uniformly around Whitaker and not Gosling.

My Choices
1. Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
2. Kazunari Ninomiya, Letters from Iwo Jima
3. Leonardo DiCaprio, The Departed
4. Daniel Craig, Casino Royale
5. Matt Damon, The Departed

I have to agree with Forest Whitaker's change of pace portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. While I have no problem with any of the actual nominees, Ulrich Muhe should have been nominated for The Lives of Others and Leonardo DiCaprio was nominated for the wrong film. He and Matt Damon should both have been nominated for The Departed. Peter O'Toole takes my fifth slot. Venus was not a particularly good film, but O'Toole was good in it.

1. Ulrich Mühe - The Lives of Others
2. Sacha Baron Cohen Borat
3. Aaron Eckhart - Thank You for Smoking
4. Leonardo DiCaprio - The Departed
5. Forest Whitaker - The Last King of Scotland

Voted for Whitaker.