AFT Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role

This is the first category of the 10th 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 117 films. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Honorable mentions:
Alex Hibbert (Moonlight), Alon Aboutboul (Is That You?), Alon Pdut (Beyond the Mountains and the Hills), Andrew Garfield (Hacksaw Ridge), Ashton Sanders (Moonlight), Barkhad Abdirahman (A Stray), Chris Klein (Game of Aces), Colin Farrell (The Lobster), Dan Stevens (The Ticket), Dave Johns (I, Daniel Blake), Dominic Rains (The Fixer), Éric Bruneau (An Eye for Beauty), Ethan Hawke (In a Valley of Violence), Ferdia Walsh-Peelo (Sing Street), Gael Garcia Bernal (Neruda), Jake Gyllenhaal (Demolition), Jason Bateman (The Family Fang), John Krasinski (The Hollars), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Snowden), Jude Law (Genius), Kevin Spacey (Elvis and Nixon), Mads Mikkelsen (Men and Chicken), Mathieu Amalric (My Golden Days), Michael Fassbender (The Light Between Oceans), Michael Shannon (Complete Unknown), Michael Shannon (Elvis and Nixon), Nate Parker (The Birth of a Nation), Neel Sethi (The Jungle Book), Nelsan Ellis (Little Boxes), Nicholas Hoult (Equals), Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool), Tom Hiddleston (High-Rise), Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight), Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic), Vincent London (The Measure of a Man)

Runners-up:
Ryan Gosling (La La Land)
Julian Dennison (Hunt for the Wilderpeople)
Michael Shannon (Wolves)
Jonathan Pryce (Dough)
Demetri Martin (Dean)

The winner:
Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea) delivered an incredible, emotionally raw turn as a man unable to even imagine what his life used to be like after devastating loss.

Other nominees:
Chris Pine (Hell or High Water) received little praise for his nuanced starring role as a conflicted criminal dealing with a highly unpredictable partner. Tom Hanks (Sully) delivered classic reliability as a pilot impossibly cool under pressure and determined to prove the correctness of his actions. Sunny Pawar (Lion) was a wonderfully endearing part of a soaring story, with just the right amount of boundless energy and youthful determination for the part. Denzel Washington (Fences) directed himself in a tour de force performance as a father intent on making his mark as a patriarch.