AFT Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role

This is the first category of the 3rd Annual AFT Film Awards to be announced. The AFT Awards are my own personal choices for the best in film of each year and the best in television of each season. The AFT Film Awards include the traditional Oscar categories and a number of additional specific honors. Nominees are pictured in the order I’ve ranked them and drawn from a pool of approximately 92 films. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order):
Sharlto Copley (District 9), Matt Damon (The Informant!), Daniel Day-Lewis (Nine), Robert Downey Jr. (Sherlock Holmes), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer), Tom Hardy (Bronson), Tom Hollander (In the Loop), Woody Harrelson (Zombieland), Viggo Mortensen (The Road), Clive Owen (Duplicity), Chris Pine (Star Trek), Brad Pitt (Inglorious Basterds), Sam Worthington (Avatar)

Runners-up:
JEFF BRIDGES (Crazy Heart)
LLUIS HOMAR (Broken Embraces)
MICHAEL STUHLBARG (A Serious Man)
JOHN KRASINSKI (Away We Go)
BEN FOSTER (The Messenger)

The winner:
Colin Firth (A Single Man) delivered a performance unlike anything he has ever done before – a tragic, heart-wrenching portrait of a man torn apart and struggling to piece himself back together.

Other nominees:
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) was incredibly real as he stared death in the eyes and didn’t blink fearless soldier absolutely able to come through in the most terrifying and deadly of circumstances. Hal Holbrook (That Evening Sun) didn’t let anyone push him around as an aging farmer, and proved that, at 84, he can still turn in a magnificent performance. George Clooney (Up in the Air) used his everyman charm to play someone who delivers bad news for a living, and demonstrated how a character can change through the people he meets in his life. Morgan Freeman (Invictus) channeled the spiritual of a political leader and captured his generosity and vision brilliantly.