AFT Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role

This is the first category of the 13th 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 233 films. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Honorable mentions:
Grant Rosenmeyer (Come As You Are), Jay Duplass (Pink Wall), Jimmie Fails (The Last Black Man in San Francisco), Ray Romano (Paddleton)

Runners-up:
Pete Davidson (Big Time Adolescence)
Shia LaBeouf (Honey Boy)
Nick Kroll (Olympic Dreams)
Adam Driver (Marriage Story)
Shuli Rand (The Unorthodox)

The winner:
Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell) warmly embodied a truly kind spirit, someone who wanted to be helpful just for the sake of being nice without perceiving all the malice others could concoct.

Other nominees:
Jonathan Pryce (The Two Popes)
Joaquin Phoenix (Joker)
Eddie Murphy (Dolemite Is My Name)
Roman Griffin Davis (Jojo Rabbit)