Ranking the Best Actor Winners of the Decade
This is usually the time of the year that I spend talking about the best-received Couch pieces of the last year. But COVID-19 has made our 4th blogaversary considerably more muted, for as you might have noticed, there has been a whole lot less to write about with the world under lockdown.
This is also the time of year where I’d start peppering with you some of the best film, music, sports and television of the first half of the year. But with COVID-19 greatly lessening the presence of new sports and music, and essentially halting new movies and television, we have had very little of that to write about. Instead, what I’m hoping to do over the next several weeks is do what many publications and TV channels alike have been doing over the last 5 months: retrospectives!
More specifically, I’m going to be looking back at the last decade in major awards show decisions. The Grammys and the Oscars— but really the Hollywood awards circuit in general —have become annual viewing experiences and emotional investments for me. They’re my favorite thing outside of actual sporting events to get needlessly worked up and competitive about, and it’s over the last decade that those annual loud and unsolicited opinions of mine really began.
Previously, we've talked about the Oscar for Best Director, as well as the Grammy for Best New Artist, for Record of the Year, and for Song of the Year.
This week, it's back to the Oscars for one of the premier awards, Best Actor. Note that the years listed in the rankings denote the year of the film that they were nominated for, not the year of the ceremony itself.
The Academy Award for Best Actor or Actress is, as you can imagine, perhaps the highest individual honor an actor can receive. So it stands to reason that it often is one of the main storylines from Oscar night-- in some cases even the storyline, if we have a surprise winner while the rest of the night goes to chalk.
What's confounding about this decade of Best Actor winners isn't that the thespians themselves aren't terrific actors; the ten of them very much were and still are. Rather, it's that few of the legendary roles and even fewer (proportionally) of the finest acting performances from these last 10 years won the award, and many weren't even nominated. These snubs include but are not limited to Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips, Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale Station, Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis, Joaquin Phoenix in Her, Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel, David Oyelowo in Selma, Denzel Washington in Fences, Ryan Gosling in First Man, Ethan Hawke in First Reformed, and the late Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther.
That said, we can chat all day about how valid the list actually is, but at the end of the day, an Oscar winner is an Oscar winner. So without further ado, my rankings of the decade’s winners for Best Actor:
10. Casey Affleck, Manchester By The Sea (2016)
I'll admit a little bit of personal bias in this selection. Not only did I not really understand the Manchester By The Sea hype, I also found it hard to get excited about Affleck's victory given the unsavory sexual assault allegations surrounding him at the very time he won, and the fact that 2016 saw another award-deserving performance in Fences's Denzel Washington. But really, despite undoubtedly turning in a good performance, he's ranked here because if you watch interviews with the guy, it's pretty clear that in this movie, Casey Affleck was playing...Casey Affleck.
9. Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club (2013)
For the record, I did and continue to enjoy the 'McCon-aissance'; Matthew McConaughey always was a more talented actor than his usually goofy roles allowed him to show. But if we're being fair, what I said about Casey Affleck could apply here: as good as his performance was in Dallas Buyers Club, and as admirable as his remarkable weight loss was, McConaughey essentially portrayed himself.
8. Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour (2017)
Yet another instance in which it didn't feel as if the actor was forced to play too out of type to earn their statue. Oldman’s transformation into Winston Churchill was remarkable, sure. But it couldn’t have been too much of a stretch for a stately British actor to play an older British statesman, and given how many other 2017 Best Actor nominees would have been deserving winners, it’s hard to feel as if this was anything but a Lifetime Achievement win— albeit a thoroughly earned one.
7. Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
My anger at Rami Malek winning this award was two-fold. For starters, much of his performance involved simply lip-syncing a Freddy Mercury impersonator. In addition, the two best acting performances of the year, by Ethan Hawke (First Reformed) and Ryan Gosling (First Man), weren’t even nominated. That said, of the men that did get nominated, it was hard to be too upset about Malek’s victory. He did a terrific job portraying a megawatt star whose presence is near-impossible to replicate.
6. Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant (2015)
At some point, Leo DiCaprio's empty Oscar cupboard became a meme. It's not entirely clear why that is, as he was far from the only renowned actor to have not gotten the award-- and arguably not even the best --but he rode that wave of sentimentality to an awards circuit coronation for his role as Hugh Glass in The Revenant. It was a solid, understated performance from DiCaprio, and in a year fairly short of memorable acting performances, he was a fine winner. Still, it's a shame that this is the role he finally got his Academy Award for, because in a filmography full of impressive emotional range, the job in this film was mostly down to physical feats.
5. Jean Dujardin, The Artist (2011)
We touched on this debate in the 'Best Director' piece a couple weeks ago- does the fact that The Artist was a silent movie make the wonderful acting more or less impressive? There's certainly an argument for less: after all, when you have no audible dialogue, it's easier to focus on the other nuances of your performance. But I tend to take the opposite view; especially in this era of shorter attention spans and easier distractions, the fact that, despite hardly ever hearing him speak, I couldn't take my eyes off of Dujardin's performance speaks to his wondrous emotive acting.
4. Colin Firth, The King's Speech (2010)
Had Colin Firth's role simply been playing a British royal, he'd probably be much lower on this ranking. Not much of the scenery or styling of The King's Speech required a whole lot of additional effort from Firth, an effortlessly classy gentleman. However, his portrayal of King George VI's famous speech impediment was devastatingly effective, and his interplay with both Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter tonally perfect. It made this king an instantly vulnerable and exceedingly human figure.
3. Joaquin Phoenix, Joker (2019)
True, there's a little bit of the DiCaprio effect at play for me here: if Joaquin Phoenix's career-long Oscar drought was going to come to an end, I kind of hate that it was for this film, a wholly uneven, imperfect movie. I will go to my grave arguing that Phoenix not even being nominated for Her (when he should have won the damn thing) is one of the most egregious Academy Award snubs ever, whereas playing the titular role in a movie about an unhinged, troubled man seemed a little more, how shall we say, on-brand for the actor.
That said, while the movie got mixed reviews, Phoenix himself got early and consistent praise, and for good reason. Heath Ledger's Joker set the precedent for disturbing-yet-engaging brilliance, but Joaquin was arguably just as marvelous, and didn't do a disservice to Ledger's memory by not attempting to emulate him. There was no comic book goulishness in Phoenix's performance, just a sick, sad, scared human being.
2. Eddie Redmayne, The Theory Of Everything (2014)
There's physical acting, then there's physical acting. With all due respect to the physical tolls DiCaprio and McConaughey undertook, and slightly less respect to Malek's prosthetic teeth and Oldman's fat suit, Eddie Redmayne's work in portraying Stephen Hawking's descent into ALS was stunning. To not only take on the task of portraying such a renowned figure in history, but to do so while also portraying the physical handicaps of someone stricken with ALS, all while making his character an engaging, emotional centerpiece, was a terrific feat, especially from such a young, relatively untested actor.
1. Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln (2012)
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Or in this case, cometh a top spot for acting accolades, cometh Daniel Day-Lewis. 'DDL,' as he is fondly called, is inevitable. He is one of the most revered actors in modern history- an 'actor's actor,' some have said, and it's not hard to see why. He was a three-time Academy Award winner as lead actor, this being his latest, and was nominated for the Best Actor award at the Oscars, Golden Globes, and/or BAFTAs nine different times, a remarkable feat when you consider that's literally half the movies he's been in. And yet, amidst such a historically acclaimed career, Lincoln might stand above as his defining role.
In it, DDL completely disappeared into his role, as he always does, but there's a world of difference between playing a fictional oil tycoon and playing a larger-than-life historical figure. Abraham Lincoln was supposed to be the total epicenter of Lincoln, but the film's writing and directing was, to be frank, mundane enough that it would have been easy for a lesser actor to lose the audience's investment. Not Daniel Day-Lewis; every single scene he was in made you feel as if you were alive in the Civil War era, on the battlefields and/or in the federal offices with President Lincoln, a President much more human and humble than what is often portrayed of the man in breathless historical retelling.
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