2009 Oscar Predictions: Best Actor

The big night is just a week away, so it's time to get serious. The Best Picture nominees are covered here. For the rest of this week, I'm going to do my level best to post my predictions for the other major categories.

For Best Actor, the nominees are:

• Richard Jenkins for The Visitor;
• Frank Langella for Frost/Nixon;
• Sean Penn for Milk;
• Brad Pitt for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; and
• Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler.

Based on my comments about Benjamin Button (I called it The Curious Case of How One Can't Recover Three Hours of One's Life), I'm sure you can guess that Brad Pitt is not my odds on favorite to win the award. I'm not picking on Pitt. I like him sometimes. But only in comedies. He comes alive on screen when he's playing a rake. Or a smartass. Or even a dumbass, like in Burn After Reading. But in dramas, and in Benjamin Button in particular, he falls flat. The aw shucks Forest Gumpishness just doesn't work.

Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler is better. I've heard it called the performance of his career, and I suppose I would agree, seeing as how his early career was basically softcore porn. And he is good in The Wrestler. He might win, but he's not my pick. I have walked out of exactly two movies in my life and The Wrestler was the second. I wanted to leave after the first fifteen minutes, but I persevered. I walked out just after he decided to come out of his short-lived retirement. Rourke does a great job of portraying a man who realizes that because he focused on his career and neglected every other aspect of his life, he is faced with being utterly alone when his career ends. But the movie is so violent and so crushingly depressing, I couldn't stand to wait to see if it has a hopeful ending. I'm betting it didn't.

Sean Penn and Frank Langella both give outstanding performances playing the title characters in Milk and Frost/Nixon. Penn simply inhabits Harvey Milk and Langella, in a quiet, understated way, shows Nixon's regret not for the bad things that he did, but for the fact that they would forever overshadow the good.

Any of the nominees except Pitt could win the award, but my money's on Richard Jenkins. In The Vistor, Jenkins takes the audience on a journey. The plot centers around undocumented immigrants semi-squatting in the New York apartment of Walter Vale, a college professor who has been living in Connecticut for several years, but travels unwillingly to New York and discovers the couple. But what Vale really discovers, or rediscovers, is himself. Long detached from life and other people, Vale literally comes alive as he connects again to music, to friends, and to heartbreak. It's a beautiful performance and a beautiful movie. Like Doubt, another that could have taken Benjamin Button's place on the list. 

Coming next, Best Actress.