One Category at a Time: Actor

What a tight year it's been for leading actors. We all knew that with such a glut of competition, someone was gonna be unpleasantly stiffed on nomination morning, but few of us probably anticipated that two of the season's top contenders (Robert Redford and Tom Hanks) would end up on the outside looking in. Since then, a clear frontrunner was established who it would be unwise not to predict. However, with an extended waiting period between nominations and voting, not to mention a strange BAFTA snub, there's still a lot of wiggle room. But first, the foremost candidate:

Review - Saving Mr. Banks

Saving Mr. Banks takes us behind the development of the Disneyfication of the Disneyfication of Mary Poppins (how meta!), the movie rights to which author P.L. Travers was notoriously resistant to sign over.

Emma Thompson plays Travers ('Mrs.' Travers, as she'll quickly tell you she prefers to be addressed), at the end of her rope and in need of money, urged by her agent to let Walt Disney Studios turn her beloved childrens book Mary Poppins into a feature film. She is loathe to let her precious creation become trivialized by the kid-friendly brand, but reluctantly agrees to travel to L.A. to work with Disney's writers and tunesmiths. Among her many insistences are that the film not be a musical, not star Dick Van Dyke, and contain no animation nor the color red. As history tells us, Disney reneged – or at least changed Travers' mind – on those stipulations.

Review - Captain Phillips

For freight liner captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), the day starts with a mundane drive to the airport with his wife, casually discussing the challenges their children will face in the modern workforce. “It's tough out there these days,” he ruefully acknowledges. “... 50 guys competing for the same job.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in impoverished Somalia, 50 men are competing for a job as well; hoping to be selected to a pirate crew just to stay fed and pay off their warlord oppressors for another week.

The disparity between these two worlds – one of affluence and one with no opportunity at all – is made sharply visible when men from each clash violently on the high seas in Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips. Based on harrowing true events that unfolded off the horn of Africa in 2009, Greengrass depicts in straight-faced detail how a band of four Somali pirates armed with automatic weapons pursued and boarded the Maersk Alabama and held its captain hostage in a confined lifeboat until the military intervened.