The CampChuck Reviewer

If there is a sentimental favorite to win an Oscar this year, it is Jeff Bridges. He is what you call an actor’s actor. Other actors especially like and respect what he’s done over the years. When he receives the Academy Award for his fifth nominated role, this will (as Bridges has said) “blow his cover as an underappreciated actor.”

In Crazy Heart, Bridges plays someone riding into the sunset of a long career, someone who used to be a country western star. Booze and who knows what else relegated him to scratching out a living in small towns. He swallows embarrassingly small perks for having once been a famous.

See Crazy Heart. It’s a good little film. But see Tender Mercies (1983). That’s an excellent film. It covers parallel territory in more memorable fashion. That said, watch Jeff Bridges inhabit his character in Crazy Heart. Watch him put well worn humanity into a character who engages our sympathies despite and because of his marginal ways.

Despite having an identifiable frontrunner, the Best Actor category provides the most depth in the major categories. The least likely ones to mine Gold happen to be the biggest stars.

Morgan Freeman -- that face, that voice. He embodies something distinctive, time and again, that we long for on the silver screen. In Invictus, he plays Nelson Mandela, and you feel some of the distance melted off the reverence the world has for a most important man.

Since Invictus travels a rather stock path as films go, it’s not a ready platform for winning Academy Awards. In part because Freeman plays such a remarkably composed individual, it seems to shrug off the need to win an Oscar.

George Clooney is well established as a serious actor and a serious person, although he does seem to have a smirk branded on his soul. With this foundation, Up in the Air showcases the George Clooney brand to good effect. Because of our tough economic times, his character’s profession – firing people -- has the film scoring more popular and critical points than it deserves. Textured Clooney vehicle though Up in the Air is, he’ll push our buttons better in some future film and win a second Oscar for that.

Jeremy Renner’s central role in The Hurt Locker helps assure the tension and realism in depicting dedicated soldiers getting dangerous jobs done in Iraq. Renner’s character encompasses over-the-top excellence and telling side effects.

It’s often difficult to single out components in the highly collaborative art of movies. If The Hurt Locker surfaces as the Oscar coup of the year, an Oscar for Renner could be part of the upswell. Likely, he will be regarded as part of a film that feels more like a well orchestrated ensemble of actors.

Perhaps the most deserving competition against the sentimental advantage that Jeff Bridges enjoys is Colin Firth in A Single Man. Bridges playing a hard living, good ol’ boy seems easier than Firth playing a closeted homosexual professor in 1962. Firth’s character also must abide the strain of having lost the love of his life in a car accident.

A Single Man stands out more as a film compared with the more common theme in Crazy Heart. In part, it’s because Firth succeeds in the nuance that he is playing a man who happens to be homosexual more than stoking still entrenched notions about the homosexual man.

Figure on the sentimental vote swaying a difficult decision to Jeff Bridges this year.