collisionwork | Judging What Maybe Shouldn't Be

This was interesting. Or at least an enjoyable waste of time.

Edward Copeland over at his blog does a little Oscar survey every year, asking the online film geek community to rank the five best and worst winners from the past in an Academy Award category. In 2006, he did the Best and Worst of the Best Pictures. In 2007, the Best and Worst of the Best Actress performances. I think I voted in the first, but not the second. It began to feel silly trying to judge one against another. Also, the "worst" always seemed to be about personal feelings toward the people involved, not any kind of actual attempt at judging the work itself (especially with the "Worst" actresses, where the criticism of younger, pretty actresses who have the TEMERITY to try to be RESPECTED as ACTRESSES headed well into misogyny). And it's still a small sample of actual cinema in any case, with what I would consider Best and Worst nowhere near being nominated most of the time.

This year, Edward turns to the Best Actor category. I looked over the list and wasn't bothering thinking about it after that - nothing made me feel like I wanted to try and decide one over the other with the actors. But from a few other posts around his and other blogs, it looks like the voting was really light this year - maybe a few others had the same feeling as me - and as I had nothing to do on a nasty rainy night, what the hell . . . I'll try and rank the Best Actors as seen by AMPAS.

I left off any performances I hadn't seen, or at least hadn't seen enough of to feel qualified to judge, which was a few - 15 or so I think. I was actually pretty interested in how this came out - I guess it says something about some kind of acting that I like. Quite a few performances I liked in movies I didn't, and really few performances I could knock at all, until we get to about the bottom 10 or so. You send in only your top five and bottom five to the survey, but in order to get those I had to cut and paste around a list of all of them, and since I wound up with the whole list for myself, here it is, from my favorite to least-favorite of the Best Actor Oscar performances, top to bottom:

Marlon Brando - On the Waterfront
Fredric March - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Alec Guinness - Bridge on the River Kwai
George C. Scott - Patton
Marlon Brando - The Godfather
Ray Milland - The Lost Weekend
Fredric March - The Best Years of Our Lives
Humphrey Bogart - The African Queen
Gregory Peck - To Kill a Mockingbird
Gene Hackman - The French Connection
Nicolas Cage - Leaving Las Vegas
Ben Kingsley - Gandhi
Daniel Day-Lewis - My Left Foot
Lee Marvin - Cat Ballou
Robert De Niro - Raging Bull
Clark Gable - It Happened One Night
Peter Finch - Network
Jack Nicholson - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Rod Steiger - In the Heat of the Night
Laurence Olivier - Hamlet
William Hurt - Kiss of the Spider Woman
Jamie Foxx - Ray
Ernest Borgnine - Marty
Jeremy Irons - Reversal of Fortune
Tom Hanks - Philadelphia
Gary Cooper - High Noon
F. Murray Abraham - Amadeus
Burt Lancaster - Elmer Gantry
James Cagney - Yankee Doodle Dandy
Rex Harrison - My Fair Lady
Victor McLaglen - The Informer
Broderick Crawford - All the King's Men
Paul Scofield - A Man for All Seasons
Jose Ferrer - Cyrano de Bergerac
John Wayne - True Grit
Dustin Hoffman - Rain Man
Maximilian Schell - Judgment at Nuremberg
Robert Duvall - Tender Mercies
Yul Brinner - The King and I
William Holden - Stalag 17
Cliff Robertson - Charly
David Niven - Separate Tables
Sidney Poitier - Lilies of the Field
Jack Lemmon - Save the Tiger
Philip Seymour Hoffman - Capote
Gary Cooper - Sergeant York
James Stewart - The Philadelphia Story
Michael Douglas - Wall Street
Tom Hanks - Forrest Gump
Ronald Colman - A Double Life
Jon Voight - Coming Home
Dustin Hoffman - Kramer Vs. Kramer
Anthony Hopkins - The Silence of the Lambs
Art Carney - Harry and Tonto
Wallace Beery - The Champ
Jack Nicholson - As Good As It Gets
Paul Newman - The Color of Money
Kevin Spacey - American Beauty
Bing Crosby - Going My Way
Russell Crowe - Gladiator
Charlton Heston - Ben-Hur
Roberto Benigni - Life Is Beautiful
Richard Dreyfuss - The Goodbye Girl
Henry Fonda - On Golden Pond
Al Pacino - Scent of a Woman

And if I had to pick my five favorite male/female performances from all of film? Never actually even thought of that before . . . and it's odd what comes up.

For men, Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday, Lee Marvin in The Killers, Brad Dourif in The Exorcist III, Richard Erdman in Cry Danger, and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.

For women, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Dr., Theresa Russell in Bad Timing, Agnes Moorehead in The Magnificent Ambersons, Julia Ormond in The Baby of Macon, and Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

At least, that's what it all looks like tonight. Ask me again tomorrow and it could all be different . . .