Best Actor: Sam Rockwell, Moon
Sam Rockwell's performance in Moon is the kind of artistic effort for which the term tour de force was coined.
Let's check imdb really quick. Take a look at the number of actors that are listed as a part of Duncan (formerly Zowie) Jones' (formerly Bowie) directorial debut: there's technically 10, but anyone who's actually seen the film knows that you can basically knock that number down to one and a half (after all, Kevin Spacey deserves some credit for his voice work).
On its own, this doesn't mean anything; God knows I could pay two guys to follow me around for an hour and a half with a camera and a boom mike—that doesn't mean I should win an Academy Award. But nobody wants to watch that. Not only did I want to watch Rockwell's inhabitation of lunar-based Sam Bell, I was compelled to. I couldn't look away.
Rockwell tackles multiple different alterations on the same basic type with a deft hand and nuanced tone, covering basically every inch of the emotional spectrum. At some times, he's forced by the script to go pyrotechnic; others, a stunned silence is all he has to work with, and he makes us feel that silence like Bell feels the vacuum of space.
Moon is a tremendous film—visually stunning and a conceptual thrill—and it deserved an Oscar nom itself, but Rockwell's acting is something else. From start to finish, he drags the audience in the wake of his revelations and discoveries, and this is made all the more impressive because he's working off nobody else.
Let's face it: Morgan Freeman had Nelson Mandela and George Clooney had the 37 times he'd already played his Up in the Air role (though he once again played it well). Rockwell had a script, a rookie director and his own talent, and with that he achieved something genuinely, authentically new. And there's few higher compliments I can pay than that.
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