Both Lead, in my opinion. Affleck doesn't need a lot of explanation. He was placed in Support because he had a more famous co-star and because he had another role in an Oscar-adjacent film that couldn't be considered supporting by any metric. At the time, I took the against-the grain stance that Affleck was even better in Gone Baby Gone, but I don't know if I would get there today. Haven't seen either movie since around 2008.
The three men in No Country never share the screen together and are all definitely the lead of their segments. Whether they constitute Leads for award placement is a different conversation, because then you need to talk about things like narrative focus, point-of-view, etc. I gave Tommy Lee Jones my Best Actor award for 2007 for both of his films (I really do think he is genuinely excellent in In the Valley of Elah), but I do think that if anyone of the three protagonists in No Country was going to be put in Support, Jone would make the most sense, because of the nature of his role: He is the outsider, the world-weary observer, and while many of the things I love the most about No Country are due to him, and he definitely does much of the thematic heavy lifting, he doesn't really drive a lot of the plot, which is a cat-and-mouse between Bardem and Brolin but also everyone else.
Two not in the poll (and not needed for the poll in my mind): Saoirse Ronan plays a leading character, but none of the three iterations of Briony are "leading", although hers probably comes the closest. I think McAvoy and Knightley dominate that segment just as much as Ronan does. I've really come around on Atonement over the past half-decade or so; it would easily be my runner-up choice of these Best Picture nominees. I would easily knock out Depp or Viggo for James McAvoy in Best Actor. (My turnaround on Atonement and my turnaround on Into the Wild in the opposite direction make me want to do a rewatch on a lot of 2007 films.)
I seem to remember some people tried to make a case for Blanchett as a Lead in I'm Not There, and we're about to get to her 2006 nomination, which is as blatant a case of category fraud as Affleck's, but I think I'm Not There is one of those multiple-storyline no-lead films.
Correcting Oscar 2007
Correcting Oscar 2007
How many years in a row did we talk about egregious category placement fraud in the 2000s? The first time it happened in my memory was Ethan Hawke, whom any rational person knew was at the very least a co-head if not the lead in Training Day. But I let it go at the time because it felt like such a fluke. Then it repeated with Jamie Foxx for Collateral. That one rankled more because he was already going to win for Ray. Why did he need this nomination as well? Then we hit at three year stride with the unforgivables: Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, Cate Blanchett for Notes on a Scandal, and Casey Affleck for The Assassination of Jesse James… We’ll talk about all of them. One could make the argument that in each case they were playing the “sexually submissive” co-protagonist, a distinction which has later come up just as wrongly with Rooney Mara for Carol, but in any case these are clear cases of studio politics to get an extra nomination. And perhaps that was the thinking with Casey Affleck who was in the running for Best Actor for Gone Baby Gone, a campaign that I don’t remember picking up any steam. But with Casey Affleck, it’s a little weirder because critics followed suit. Save for the Chlotrudis Awards, the Dublin Film Critics, the Faro Island Film Festival, and the Utah Film Festival, he picked up no notices for Best Leading Actor. He was nominated across the board for supporting. The Village Voice split and nominated him in 7th Place for Best Actor and 2nd Place for Best Supporting Actor.
At the time, I attributed this to lock-step thinking in how to honor this actor who clearly had a breakout year but maybe wouldn’t figure into the race otherwise. Or certainly, it was possible that enough people viewed Brad Pitt enough as the lead. But I walked away from The Assassination of Jesse James… convinced that I had seen best performance of the year shit (to say nothing of the great film itself), a hypnotic tale of two fates intertwined. But as I look at the percentages, Casey Affleck is in the film for only 39.29% of the lengthy running time. I don’t have Brad Pitt to contrast but Assassination is such a strangely edited film that I really couldn’t say how much more he has. It’s possible that by these metrics, the leading actor in The Assassination of Jesse James… is The Wheat. Anyway, Casey Affleck may not be the main driver of the action but this isn’t really a film about the execution of plans but more about the passage of time. Casey Affleck gets leading consideration from me.
But would he have been nominated if pushed as a lead. Increasingly, I think so. Best Actor was a flukey enough race that saw Tommy Lee Jones nominated for In the Valley of Elah. He was quite good in that film but missed the precursors entirely. I probably had him running 8th, 9th, or 10th behind a weird mix of Ryan Gosling for Lars and the Real Girl, Emile Hirsh for Into the Wild, James McAvoy for Atonement, and Denzel Washington for American Gangster to say nothing of Johnny Depp or Viggo Mortensen, themselves rather flukey nods. None of these performances really lit up the imagination. I think the only real hurdle against Affleck getting a nomination for lead is that Daniel Day-Lewis so thoroughly dominated that category that he wouldn’t get the critical awards needed to get visibility. But 2007 was the “Dark Oscars” and few performances punched those keys so hard.
So, I vote Lead. I think Casey Affleck would get a nomination over Tommy Lee Jones, Johnny Depp, or Viggo Mortensen.
One person that I didn’t put ahead of Jones was Josh Brolin, who in my opinion deserved a nomination for No Country for Old Men. Brolin would have to wait a year for his moment, but should we consider Javier Bardem a lead for No Country for Old Men? The film is set up so that Brolin is the protagonist and that Bardem is relentlessly pursuing him. It’s a game of cat and mouse and had the film continued as it was set up, I might agree with Bardem’s placement… but it certainly reveals itself to have other things on its mind by the end. It’s hard to think of Josh Brolin as a dominant leading actor by the credits when you barely remember what the mouse looks like.
In terms of Bardem’s presence on-screen, I see that he has 23.66% screen-time. I’d wager that that number would go up if we included the moments where he is on the other side of a door, where his danger couldn’t be more felt. He might have a single-minded focus but he certainly interacts with other characters in this film. In fact, he introduces us to it the film and all and almost closes it out.
The category placement that makes the most sense to me is that Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem are both leading actors while Tommy Lee Jones is the supporting player. Would Bardem have gotten a leading nomination? I think so. I don’t think anything gets in the way of that performance getting nominated. And with Bardem in lead, that gives Jones his window in supporting for his more meaningful performance of 2007.
And so, I am proposing a year where the nominees for Best Actor are:
*Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
*Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
*George Clooney, Michael Clayton
*Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
*Johnny Depp or Viggo Mortensen
Now that’s better.
At the time, I attributed this to lock-step thinking in how to honor this actor who clearly had a breakout year but maybe wouldn’t figure into the race otherwise. Or certainly, it was possible that enough people viewed Brad Pitt enough as the lead. But I walked away from The Assassination of Jesse James… convinced that I had seen best performance of the year shit (to say nothing of the great film itself), a hypnotic tale of two fates intertwined. But as I look at the percentages, Casey Affleck is in the film for only 39.29% of the lengthy running time. I don’t have Brad Pitt to contrast but Assassination is such a strangely edited film that I really couldn’t say how much more he has. It’s possible that by these metrics, the leading actor in The Assassination of Jesse James… is The Wheat. Anyway, Casey Affleck may not be the main driver of the action but this isn’t really a film about the execution of plans but more about the passage of time. Casey Affleck gets leading consideration from me.
But would he have been nominated if pushed as a lead. Increasingly, I think so. Best Actor was a flukey enough race that saw Tommy Lee Jones nominated for In the Valley of Elah. He was quite good in that film but missed the precursors entirely. I probably had him running 8th, 9th, or 10th behind a weird mix of Ryan Gosling for Lars and the Real Girl, Emile Hirsh for Into the Wild, James McAvoy for Atonement, and Denzel Washington for American Gangster to say nothing of Johnny Depp or Viggo Mortensen, themselves rather flukey nods. None of these performances really lit up the imagination. I think the only real hurdle against Affleck getting a nomination for lead is that Daniel Day-Lewis so thoroughly dominated that category that he wouldn’t get the critical awards needed to get visibility. But 2007 was the “Dark Oscars” and few performances punched those keys so hard.
So, I vote Lead. I think Casey Affleck would get a nomination over Tommy Lee Jones, Johnny Depp, or Viggo Mortensen.
One person that I didn’t put ahead of Jones was Josh Brolin, who in my opinion deserved a nomination for No Country for Old Men. Brolin would have to wait a year for his moment, but should we consider Javier Bardem a lead for No Country for Old Men? The film is set up so that Brolin is the protagonist and that Bardem is relentlessly pursuing him. It’s a game of cat and mouse and had the film continued as it was set up, I might agree with Bardem’s placement… but it certainly reveals itself to have other things on its mind by the end. It’s hard to think of Josh Brolin as a dominant leading actor by the credits when you barely remember what the mouse looks like.
In terms of Bardem’s presence on-screen, I see that he has 23.66% screen-time. I’d wager that that number would go up if we included the moments where he is on the other side of a door, where his danger couldn’t be more felt. He might have a single-minded focus but he certainly interacts with other characters in this film. In fact, he introduces us to it the film and all and almost closes it out.
The category placement that makes the most sense to me is that Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem are both leading actors while Tommy Lee Jones is the supporting player. Would Bardem have gotten a leading nomination? I think so. I don’t think anything gets in the way of that performance getting nominated. And with Bardem in lead, that gives Jones his window in supporting for his more meaningful performance of 2007.
And so, I am proposing a year where the nominees for Best Actor are:
*Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
*Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
*George Clooney, Michael Clayton
*Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
*Johnny Depp or Viggo Mortensen
Now that’s better.
"How's the despair?"