Oscar Preview: Best Actor

In the Best Actor Oscar race this year, there are some heavy hitters on the short list, including a few previous winners, but the field overall is weak, much like two years ago when Ryan Gosling snuck in. There's also a plethora of geezers among those mentioned by the Great Mentioners, which could make this one of the oldest aggregate quintets in Oscar history.

I see two slam-dunk nominations, both of them members of the Ocean gang: George Clooney, earning advance raves for his role as an itinerant businessman in Up in the Air, and Matt Damon, so marvelous as The Informant! Damon's role is outwardly very comedic, at which Oscar normally turns up his nose, but I think the effect is so strong in this picture that Damon will not be overlooked. He could double-dip this year, as he has a prominent supporting role in Clint Eastwood's Invictus.

Speaking of Invictus, that film stars previous winner Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, which sounds like an Oscar nomination if there ever was one. But no one has seen the film. The same for Daniel Day-Lewis in the big musical Nine. Johnny Depp managed to snag a nomination for an intense actor doing musical comedy, but Sweeney Todd wasn't light-hearted fare like Nine is. Last year's winner, Sean Penn, stars in the enigmatic Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, but it's unclear how large Penn's role is.

If three of the nominees come from the list above, I would suspect the other two would come from these: Jeremy Renner, so good as a bomb-disposal unit soldier in The Hurt Locker, Colin Firth as A Single Man or Michael Stuhlbarg as A Serious Man (I'm going to confuse those titles and blend them into A Simple Man all winter), or Viggo Mortensen in The Road. That film has seen some wildly diverging advance critical response, so he's a real wild card.

Then there are the old-timers: Christopher Plummer in The Last Station, Hal Holbrook in That Evening Sun, Michael Caine in Harry Brown, or Robert Duvall in Get Low. Apparently the last of these has been pushed back to 2010, and I'm not sure if Caine's film has found a distributor yet, but if it does watch out.