AFT Awards: Best Actor in a Supporting Role

This is the third category of the 4th 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 177 films. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order):
Roger Allam (Tamara Drewe), Mathieu Amalric (Wild Grass), Niels Arestup (A Prophet), Lucas Black (Get Low), Jim Broadbent (Another Year), Eric Cantona (Looking for Eric), Gary Cole (The Joneses), Andre Dussolier (Micmacs), Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom), Chris Evans (The Losers), Guillermo Francella (The Secret in their Eyes), Zach Galifianakis (It’s Kind of a Funny Story), Andrew Garfield (The Social Network), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception), Armie Hammer (The Social Network), Tom Hardy (Inception), Garrett Hedlund (Country Strong), Jonah Hill (Cyrus), Dustin Hoffman (Barney’s Version), Bob Hoskins (Made in Dagenham),Tommy Lee Jones (The Company Men), Ben Kingsley (Shutter Island), Dick Latessa (The Last New Yorker), Michael Lonsdale (Of Gods and Men), Nicolas Marie (Micmacs), Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom), Cillian Murphy (Inception), Sean Penn (Fair Game), Oliver Platt (Please Give), Pablo Rago (The Secret in their Eyes), Mickey Rourke (Iron Man 2), Justin Timberlake (The Social Network), Phillippe Torreton (District 13: Ultimatum)

Runners-up:
ANTHONY HOPKINS (The City of Your Final Destination)
EDDIE MARSAN (The Disappearance of Alice Creed)
YVAN ATTAL (Leaving)
MATT DAMON (True Grit)
ANDREW GARFIELD (The Social Network)

The winner:
Christian Bale (The Fighter) disappeared into the troubled character of Dicky Eklund, and his dramatic weight loss was hardly the only notable part of his transformation.

Other nominees:
Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech) breathed marvelous life into a film full of (purposely) stiff personalities, refusing to let their negative spirits bring him down. John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) was unrecognizable as the terrifying Teardop. Michael Fassbender (Fish Tank) offered a layered portrait of a man with immoral tendencies but a kind heart. Nigel Lindsay (Four Lions) was hilarious as the most purposefully ridiculous of his terrorists-in-training cohorts.