AFT Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role

This is the first category of the 7th 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 100 films. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Honorable mentions:
Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club), Nicolas Maury (Let My People Go!), Adam Scott (A.C.O.D.), Maciej Stuhr (Aftermath), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Don Jon), Alexander Skarsgard (The East), James Gandolfini (Enough Said), George Clooney (Gravity), Gabriel Byrne (Just a Sigh), Daniel Radcliffe (Kill Your Darlings), Gael Garcia Bernal (No), Vincent Cassel (Our Day Will Come), Chris Hemsworth (Rush), Miles Teller (The Spectacular Now), Paul Eenhoorn (This is Martin Bonner), Patrick Bruel (What's in a Name?), Charles Berling (What's in a Name?), Joel Edgerton (Wish You Were Here), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street)

Runners-up:
Tye Sheridan (Mud)
Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave)
Daniel Bruhl (Rush)
Joaquin Phoenix (Her)
Bruce Dern (Nebraska)

The winner:
Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station) delivered a heartbreaking, intimate, and extremely endearing performance as a young man unknowingly living out the last 24 hours of his life.

Other nominees:
Tom Hanks (Captain Phillips) proved that he’s still going strong with this focused, intense turn as a courageous captain dealing with an unthinkable situation. Steve Coogan (The Look of Love) was smarmy and bubbling with sexual energy as a magnate surrounded by people but incredibly lonely. Nicholas Hoult (Warm Bodies) was hilarious with an American accent as a different, more sophisticated kind of zombie. Michael Shannon (The Iceman) was chilling and believable as the appropriately-named assassin.