The past year was a tremendous one for Lead Actor performances, which is why gauging potential Academy Awards nominations in the category was such a tricky task. Our staff had expected your list to ignore some of the worthier Supporting Actor roles in favor of the showier, meatier ones given to the bigger names in the industry. You pleasantly surprised us yet again by returning ballots that only slightly favored Leads over Supporting players. In fact, if we consider Jeff Bridges not the lead in True Grit, the final tally is five to five. I commend you for showing such forethought with your selections.
The winner in the category is Colin Firth, something upon which you, the Academy and BOP agree. For all of the magnificent performances offered over the past 12 months, there were undeniably two roles that stood above the others, one from a man and one from a woman. I won’t spoil Best Actress for you here, but I will say that Firth had a much tougher fight than the winner of that category did. The stately Englishman Oscar-winning role narrowly edged that of fellow Best Actor nominee Jesse Eisenberg by a mere 6%.
This is one of the closest voting margins in Reader Awards history. Ordinarily, your selections are so unanimous that they border on ballot stuffing. In this particular category in this particular year, however, you were deeply conflicted. In fact, the voting from first to tenth place in Best Actor is closer than the difference from first to third place in Best Actress. Keeping that in mind, the rest of your top ten are all selections who were all in the running for winning the category for an extended period.
In the end, you agreed with us on eight out of ten roles. John Hawkes missed winning our Best Supporting Actor category by an eyelash, but he garnered no love from the People’s Republic of BOP. Conversely, we chose only one Leonardo DiCaprio role, Inception, while his work in Shutter Island fell just outside the top ten. You felt he offered two of the ten finest performances of the year and experienced difficulty in choosing which you preferred. If DiCaprio hadn’t split his own vote this year, he could have finished as high as third.
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