I originally posted a version of this list in early 2012. Mostly because I like making lists. There was no real methodology to it. I looked back at it at some point in the past four months and saw it skewed heavily toward personal preference. The performances I liked the best went to the top, and the performances I thought were terrible winners went straight to the bottom.
Since the Oscar Quest, Version 2 that I’ve been doing, I noticed the point of it was more to reflect what my thoughts were now five years later from the completion/posting of all the original articles. I tried to stay away from redoing everything I did the first time, because a lot of it felt like it begat negativity on my part. I really don’t want to shit on things now so much as I’d want to openly discuss what is or isn’t a good choice historically.
Because that’s now where I’m at, I think redoing these lists is something I can get away with. If only to give myself a marker for where my head is at now.
I’m not putting any stock into these whatsoever. I don’t even really want to make these easily findable for people, though I guess I should, if only to track changes over the years. I was going to write up actual opinions for each one, justifying its position, but that’s a fool’s errand. That’s for people looking for extra clicks and people writing in the comments. I don’t want that. This is purely for me.
The first time I wrote this up, I specified that the rankings were not me attempting to make a list for everyone to follow. It was just my favorites. This time, I think what I ended up doing was trying to factor in everything into the decision. How iconic the performance/film is, how good of a choice it was in its year (extremely strong choices get slight bumps, and extremely weak choices get slight deductions), and also how I feel about them.
So here’s where my head is at now on all the Best Actor winners:
1. Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront
2. Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird
3. Marlon Brando, The Godfather
4. Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
5. Robert De Niro, Raging Bull
6. Fredric March, The Best Years of Our Lives
7. Alec Guinness, The Bridge on the River Kwai
8. Paul Scofield, A Man for All Seasons
9. Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
10. George C. Scott, Patton
11. Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot
12. Sean Penn, Milk
13. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
14. Peter Finch, Network
15. Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
16. Adrien Brody, The Pianist
17. Anthony Hopkins, The Silence of the Lambs
18. Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump
19. F. Murray Abraham, Amadeus
20. Ben Kingsley, Gandhi
21. Jamie Fox, Ray
22. Dustin Hoffman, Kramer vs. Kramer
23. Burt Lancaster, Elmer Gantry
24. Maximilian Schell, Judgment at Nuremberg
25. James Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandy
26. Jon Voight, Coming Home
27. Broderick Crawford, All the King’s Men
28. Ray Milland, The Lost Weekend
29. Gary Cooper, High Noon
30. Victor McLaglen, The Informer
31. Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
32. Colin Firth, The King’s Speech
33. William Hurt, The Kiss of the Spider Woman
34. Ernest Borgnine, Marty
35. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man
36. William Holden, Stalag 17
37. Laurence Olivier, Hamlet
38. Charlton Heston, Ben-Hur
39. Nicholas Cage, Leaving Las Vegas
40. Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
41. Matthew McConughey, Dallas Buyers Club
42. Gene Hackman, The French Connection
43. Kevin Spacey, American Beauty
44. Yul Brynner, The King and I
45. Geoffrey Rush, Shine
46. Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything
47. Rod Steiger, In the Heat of the Night
48. Tom Hanks, Philadelphia
49. Robert Donat, Goodbye, Mr. Chips
50. Humphrey Bogart, The African Queen
51. Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
52. Michael Douglas, Wall Street
53. Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland
54. Denzel Washington, Training Day
55. Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman
56. Jack Nicholson, As Good as It Gets
57. Robert Duvall, Tender Mercies
58. Jeremy Irons, Reversal of Fortune
59. Jack Lemmon, Save the Tiger
60. Roberto Benigni, Life Is Beautiful
61. Spencer Tracy, Captains Courageous
62. Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady
63. Russell Crowe, Gladiator
64. Wallace Beery, The Champ
65. Bing Crosby, Going My Way
66. Clark Gable, It Happened One Night
67. Jean Dujardin, The Artist
68. Henry Fonda, On Golden Pond
69. Jose Ferrer, Cyrano de Bergerac
70. Cliff Robertson, Charley
71. Richard Dreyfuss, The Goodbye Girl
72. David Niven, Separate Tables
73. Paul Lukas, Watch on the Rhine
74. Gary Cooper, Sergeant York
75. Paul Newman, The Color of Money
76. Emil Jannings, The Last Command & The Way of All Flesh
77. James Stewart, The Philadelphia Story
78. Art Carney, Harry and Tonto
79. Sidney Poitier, Lilies of the Field
80. John Wayne, True Grit
81. Lee Marvin, Cat Ballou
82. Ronald Colman, A Double Life
83. Sean Penn, Mystic River
84. Paul Muni, The Story of Louis Pasteur
85. Charles Laughton, The Private Life of Henry VIII
86. Fredric March, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
87. Warner Baxter, In Old Arizona
88. Lionel Barrymore, A Free Soul
89. George Arliss, Disraeli
90. Spencer Tracy, Boys Town
