Best Actor
Nominees:
*Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
George Clooney, Up in the Air
Colin Firth, A Single Man
Morgan Freeman, Invictus
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker
This Oscar would be satisfying if it went to any of the four men who won't get it. Renner, little known before playing Master Sergeant Will James, captures the ferocious expertise of a mad-genius bomb defuser. Firth brings a discreet melancholy to the role of a gent tempted by suicide when his lover dies. And Freeman gets props for realizing his dream of a Nelson Mandela movie. For a while this award belonged to Clooney, 48, the very model of Hollywood glamour. He gave a career-defining and self-critiquing performance as Ryan Bingham, the management consultant who fires people for a living, and who loves being airborne and untouchable. Clooney also deserved points for his producing of the TV fundraiser for Haiti.
Then destiny stuck its foot in Clooney's path with the last-minute release of Crazy Heart. This amiable miniature portrait of a country singer on the skids reminded the industry that Bridges, 61, has been giving reliably sharp, nuanced performances at least since The Last Picture Show, which earned the actor his first Oscar nomination 38 years ago. This movie is way too slack and comfy and doesn't come close to representing Bridges' best work, but he's liked and admired and has never won a lead-acting Oscar. Wait a sec — that's true of Clooney too. No matter: the zeitgeist is with Bridges, whose Oscar will serve as a premature Lifetime Achievement Award. His chief rival's only, and considerable, consolation prize: hey, he's George Clooney!