AFT Awards: Best Limited Performance – Male

This is the eighteenth category of the 9th 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. Click here to see previous years of this category, which is sometimes split into male and female and sometimes been combined.

Honorable mentions:
Bryan Brown (Kill Me Three Times), Corey Stoll (Black Mass), David Harbour (Black Mass), James Badge Dale (The Walk), John Slattery (Spotlight), Jon Bernthal (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl), Luke Hemsworth (Kill Me Three Times), Michael Chernus (Mistress America), Peter Sarsgaard (Black Mass)

The winner:
Stanley Tucci (Spotlight) accomplished a careful balance between rightful paranoia and legal incompetence, crafting a believable and magnetic character in the process.

Other nominees:
Billy Crudup (Spotlight) was one smiling face assuring everyone that nothing was wrong, a perfect friendly symbol for the monstrous coverups of misdeeds, while Jamey Sheridan (Spotlight) painted a more human picture of the difficulty of deciding what to do in impossible situations. Nick Offerman (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) was hilariously obsessive about his strange meats and odd outlook on life, perfectly cast for a peculiar part. Michael Chernus (People, Places, Things) delivered a wonderfully funny and fresh take on the “other man” and all the awkwardness that comes along with that.