Oscar's Best Actor 2023

Bill Nighy has become a welcome ubiquitous presence in films on both sides of the pond the last twenty years. That sort of visibility started with Love Actually. He was already fifty-five. Now he’s in his seventies and enjoying his first Oscar nomination. Eternally likeable and constantly working, he has won BAFTAs and if he can hang on for five or six more years he may hit the combo of likeable performance in a great, high-profile project and he may well be back at the Oscars. But for somebody whose career took off later in his life, this nomination is a nice acknowledgement.

Paul Mescal is not well known, but he gives a wonderful, complicated, touching performance in Aftersun that rightly landed him among the Best Actor class. This is writer/director Charlotte Wells’ feature debut and she is a talent to watch, as is her leading man. You may have noticed him a couple years ago in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter and he won a BAFTA for the Brit TV piece ”Normal People”, but after his charming, painful work in Aftersun he has arrived. It would be a huge upset if he were to actually win, though if enough of the Academy voters sit down and watch Aftersun it could be a night to remember.

Unlike Mescal, Colin Farrell is famous and has been famous for two decades. He quickly made the leap from small British productions to big American ones. Unfortunately a lot of those films, though they had good paychecks and got his face in a lot of cinemas, were not very good (Daredevil, The Recruit, American Outlaws, Hart’s War). That initial period of his career kind of culminated with Oliver Stone’s overblown and ridiculous Alexander with Farrell terribly miscast as Alexander the Great, though with that script and direction I doubt any actor could have made much out of it. His personal life was a bit chaotic at the time as well, but he got sober and started making better, more interesting choices and better filmmakers. Malick’s The New World, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled remake, Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Martin McDonogh’s debut In Bruges. He keeps his hands in straighter fare too, but it is better balanced and he has proven he is much more than the heartthrob he broke through as. In the same year that he played a new Penguin in Matt Reeves’ The Batman and a diver in Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives he has maybe his best role yet in The Banshees of Inisherin. His character is guileless and honestly confused and quite possibly the dumbest person on this small Irish island, and his defacto best friend has suddenly severed their relationship because he is dull. But Farrell plays such depth of feeling and humanity in a character who could have been reduced to caricature. The sadness and befuddlement is touching. I would vote for him, but he’s likely gonna finish third in this horse race.

There are co-favorites in this category as both Austin Butler and Brendan Fraser have been splitting most of the awards this season. I am too old to know Austin Butler from his Nickelodeon/Disney Channel TV roots as a child actor. The first time I really noticed him was a few years ago in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as the Manson Family’s Tex Watson who Quentin gave a very different fate to than history. As the latest actor to inhabit the legendary Presley, he has become an overnight star. Everybody on the planet can do an Elvis impression so the trick is to make him more than the lounge level recreation of his drawl, hair, and outfits. For me I don’t think he added much depth or nuance to it, but hey, somebody loves it. Brendan Fraser had a great start to his career, a star in his twenties and thirties. Dopey comedies like Encino Man and Airheads, dramas like School Ties and Gods & Monsters, and blockbusters like George of the Jungle and The Mummy franchise. Sometime around when The Mummy movies ran their course Fraser seemed to fall out of favor, for whatever reason. He never stopped working, but he wasn’t making any high-profile projects anymore. When he popped up in Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move two years ago it seemed like he had returned from a long exile. Aronofsky then tapped him for The Whale and this year he’s in Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon. What a resurgence. There was a touch of pushback in some corners because Fraser had to wear a fat suit to play the outrageously obese character, but I think that has faded. He should win Best Actor in a few weeks and complete this “comeback”, at least a comeback to prominence.