Best Actor nominees at the 2010 Oscars: the full list
All five Best Actor nominees at the 2010 Oscars, the films behind each performance and the winner, Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart.
The Best Actor race at the 82nd Academy Awards, held on March 7, 2010, brought together five very different kinds of leading man. There was a washed-up country singer, a corporate traveler who fires people for a living, a grieving professor, Nelson Mandela himself, and a bomb disposal expert in Iraq. Jeff Bridges came in with momentum and a career's worth of goodwill, having been nominated several times without a win. His performance in Crazy Heart finally got him there. All five films are worth seeing, and together they work as a snapshot of American acting at the end of that decade.
The five Best Actor nominees of 2010
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart · Winner
Bridges is Bad Blake, an alcoholic country singer who gets one last chance through an unexpected love.
Worth it if: you like music, second chances and gentle character studies.
George Clooney, Up in the Air
Clooney plays a man who flies across the United States firing people, until his tidy life starts to wobble.
Worth it if: you like smart, bittersweet comedies about work and loneliness.
Colin Firth, A Single Man
Firth plays a gay English professor in 1962 Los Angeles mourning his partner, in Tom Ford's directing debut.
Worth it if: you appreciate elegant style and intimate stories of grief.
Morgan Freeman, Invictus
Freeman is Nelson Mandela, who uses the 1995 Rugby World Cup to bring a divided South Africa together.
Worth it if: you like uplifting sports stories and real history.
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker
Renner plays a bomb disposal sergeant in Iraq hooked on danger. The film itself won Best Picture that year.
Worth it if: you want nerve-racking tension from start to finish.
Who won Best Actor at the 2010 Oscars?
Jeff Bridges won Best Actor at the 2010 Oscars for Crazy Heart, playing the fading country singer Bad Blake. It was his first Academy Award after several earlier nominations.
How Oscar nominations work
Each branch of the Academy picks the nominees in its own field, so actors choose actors, directors choose directors and editors choose editors. The whole membership can nominate for Best Picture, and the whole membership then votes on the winners. That two-step process is why a film can dominate the nominations and still leave the ceremony with very little.
A quick note on dates: this post uses the year of the ceremony, not the year the film came out. A film released in one year usually competes at the ceremony held early in the next, which is why the same title can appear under two different years depending on the source.
Want to turn this into a watchlist? On Rankiew you can mark what you have seen, rate each title from 1 to 10, write a short review and build a public list to share with friends. It is a simple way to see how much of Oscar history you have actually watched.
