Best actor

A very hard choice, but, for my money, Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of Theodore in the melancholic Sci-fi flick “Her” is the best acting performance of the year.  It is really shame, for this is the second year in a row that Joaquin Pheonix hasn’t even been nominated for best actor– last year, it was “The Master.”  Few actors have the ability to speak to themselves for roughly an entire movie the way Phoenix does in this film, and I honestly could have just had a movie of him doing future stuff for two hours.  Theodore is a classic romantic, so it is especially ironic that his most heavy-handed and cheesy love scenes are with an operating system.  After walking out of the theatre, I could only think about the versatility of Joaquin Phoenix’s acting abilities.

Honorable Mentions: Matthew McConaughey for “Dallas Buyers Club”, Jake Gyllenhal for “Prisoners”, Bruce Dern for “Nebraska”, Chiwetel Ejiofor for “12 Years a Slave”, Leonardo DiCaprio for “Wolf of Wall Street”, Matthew McConaughey for “Mud”