The decade is officially halfway done! There’s still a lot to come, but let’s get the process started on this ranking. I’ll keep adding winners as they are announced and we’ll see how this list plays out by the end of the decade. If you want more in the meantime, feel free to browse other decades.
Just a quick note on process: I will comment on whether or not an actor deserved their win but whether or not they were worthy of Oscar cannot in and of itself impact their place in the ranking. Also, these lists are fluid for me. I reserve the right to revisit and rethink them over time and make changes. The Academy is stuck with its choices but I am under no such obligation.
5. Brendan Fraser, The Whale (2022)
The performance Brendan Fraser is trying to give is the best thing about The Whale, which I consider a truly execrable movie. Fraser genuinely worked to make Charlie, a grieving obese man attempting to reconnect with his teenage daughter before he dies, an empathetic and good man. The problem is that the rest of the movie isn’t anywhere near as interested in humanizing Charlie–which is why I said “the performance he’s trying to give.” The movie undercuts his efforts at every turn by being mean-spirited and inviting the viewer to leer at Charlie as if this is a carnival freak show. There’s a jarring disconnect between Fraser’s intentions and the movie’s.
Had the rest of The Whale been on the same wavelength as Fraser, his performance might have worked better–because I think his approach would have been the correct one. Or at least it would have been the least incorrect, given that the script itself is a little ham-handed and obvious. Instead, the cruel tone of The Whale makes everything Fraser does feel like a parody of good-hearted naivete.
And even though I’m being kind toward Fraser’s obvious good intentions, it has to be said that he is occasionally mawkish himself.
Should have won in 2022: If I go along with how the acting races operated, my vote goes to Colin Farrell for The Banshees of Inisherin without regret. But I still wonder if Ke Huy Quan was more of a co-lead with Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once. That would allow me to move him here (where he would still win by a wide margin). But since Everything is more about Yeoh’s character, I’ll allow the categories to stand the way they worked out. So, in my world Colin Farrell would have narrowly edged Paul Mescal’s depressed father in Aftersun to claim the prize.
4. Will Smith, King Richard (2021)
I feel like it’s necessary to say that Will Smith’s position in this ranking has nothing to do with his behavior at the ceremony where he won his statue. I don’t even want to go into that here. I will just say that my ranking of the Best Actor contenders for this year would have been different from the Academy’s. Truthfully, Will Smith would have been running in fourth place on my ballot. He’s very good as Richard Williams, the pushy and uncompromising father of Venus and Serena Williams. But to me, his performance is almost all surface level. He does a great impression of Williams. He does a great job conveying the anger and the desperation. But he doesn’t dive very deep inside–at least not as deeply as his competitors. It’s similar to my complaint about Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody.
Should have won in 2021: I originally waffled between Benedict Cumberbatch for The Power of the Dog and Andrew Garfield for tick, tick… BOOM! In the years since, I’ve begun to realize that I overlooked the person who I think really deserved it: Hidetoshi Nishijima for his role as a grief-stricken director in Drive My Car.
3. Adrien Brody, The Brutalist (2024)
Not long after Brody’s first Best Actor win for The Pianist, it began to feel increasingly unlikely that we would see him back onstage accepting a major acting award. Then came Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. In many ways, it represents a return to the subjects that brought Brody his first Oscar: chiefly, the Holocaust, survival, and the dehumanizing impact of hatred and othering. But there are enough differences (and enough time has passed) that this doesn’t feel like (most charitably) a retread or (least charitably) a desperate gamble for relevance based on what previously worked.
For one thing, László Tóth (Brody’s character) has already survived when the film opens, having arrived in America and been greeted by the Statue of Liberty before the opening credits begin to play. If The Pianist is about the fight to hide and stay alive in the moment, The Brutalist is about what comes next. Brody perfectly embodies this, projecting a heavy weariness in every scene. You may not know exactly what László saw in the war, but you know very well that it has never left him, and never will leave him. My feelings about The Brutalist itself are complicated (I think it’s ponderous, agonizingly overlong, and deliberately inscrutable until the final scene), but Brody is undeniably terrific. He makes László real — in all his genius, his tendencies toward self-destruction, his hope, and his despair.
Should have won in 2024: In the lead-up to Oscar night, it was clear that Best Actor was a two-way race between Brody and Timothée Chalamet. As good as Chalamet is playing Bob Dylan, there’s a hollowness in that film that I can’t get by. In the end, I have no qualms saying that Brody deserved it by a wide margin.
2. Anthony Hopkins, The Father (2020)
The biggest shock of the Oscar races for 2020 was that Best Actor seemed like a lock for Chadwick Boseman, who was set to be the first posthumous acting winner since Heath Ledger thanks to his stellar turn in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (a performance all the more remarkable knowing that Boseman was dying of cancer at the time it was filmed). Instead, after a successful run through the precursors, Boseman lost to Hopkins at the BAFTAs–in hindsight, perhaps the first omen that voters were tired of the (seeming) inevitability of the Best Actor race. Whatever the cause, the result was totally unexpected. So unexpected that the producers of that year’s show announced Best Actor last, likely gambling that Boseman’s posthumous win would be an emotional high to end on. Instead, the show ended utterly without ceremony (due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Anthony Hopkins was safely sequestered in his home in Wales and unable to attend the ceremony).
At the end of the day, though, a truly spectacular performance won. It’s easy to take a legendary actor like Anthony Hopkins for granted, but The Father is some of his best work. As a man losing himself to dementia, Hopkins expertly fluctuates between assurance and confusion, cruelty and playfulness–often in the very same scene. His character is the point the entire movie pivots around, which made it all the more crucial that he never miss a beat. Hopkins expertly sells the complexities of his character without a single misstep. It’s a showcase for a master at work.
Should have won in 2020: While it’s sad that there won’t be another chance to reward Chadwick Boseman, I think the Academy got it right with Hopkins.
1. Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer (2023)
Like Hopkins, Cillian Murphy is the beating heart of his movie. Their performances are so essential to the success of their movies that without them, the whole enterprise would likely come crashing down. But in the end, I think Cillian Murphy is even more crucial to selling Christopher Nolan’s complicated three-hour epic about the life of the man who created the atomic bomb and the complicated legacy he left behind. The fact that Murphy expertly meets the task without missing a single beat makes his performance in Oppenheimer nothing less than a triumph. Without him, it’s very possible Oppenheimer wouldn’t have ended up being a Best Picture winner.
Should have won in 2023: The sad thing about the best actor race in 2023 is that any of the nominees would have been a worthy winner had they taken place in a different year. I could make a legitimate case for why the Oscar could have gone to Paul Giamatti, Colman Domingo, Bradley Cooper, or Jeffrey Wright. All of them did phenomenal work. But in the end, Cillian Murphy deserved this win.
Other Rankings for the 2020s
Supposedly Fun 