The Golden Bin Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role

April 16, 2021 0 By Jeff Bulmer

Two of the year’s best

In this series based on the Oscars Deathrace series of articles I wrote for The Phoenix News over the last few years, I spotlight my personal picks for this year’s Oscars, as well as some notable snubs.

Winner: Chadwick Boseman – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom stars Chadwick Boseman in what would tragically become his final performance ever. As Levee Green, the actor known best for his roles in Black Panther, Marshall, and Get On Up gives what will easily go down as a career-highlight performance, and the one to beat for this year’s Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

An eccentric trumpet player working for “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey (Viola Davis), Levee aspires to stardom. Not content with simply playing the songs as written, Levee re-arranges every song for Ma’s album. Levee wants to add danceability, energy, and play to more modern tastes. But his refusal to simply step aside and play Ma’s songs has Levee clashing with Ma and bandleader Carter (Coleman Domingo) at nearly every turn.

Levee is a show-stealer, drawing Ma’s ire whenever he draws attention on stage. Similarly, Boseman is electric, and the centre of every scene he appears in. Domingo and Davis put in stellar performances, but don’t hold a candle when they need to share the screen with Boseman.

Boseman’s performance is dynamic, as well, always energetic, but conveying emotions from boyish excitement to seething anger. The actor gets several opportunities to monologue and delivers some of the best speeches in any movie this year. When called out for letting Ma’s white manager walk all over him, Levee tells a story of heinous racist hate crimes committed against his family, and what that taught him about white people. Chastised by Ma for playing “too many notes”, Levee emphatically quits the band, while letting them know everything they’re getting wrong about music.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is technically a story about the Mother of the Blues, but the real star is Levee Green, a bright-eyed up-and-comer in the music world, but one who isn’t naïve about how the world works, either.
Boseman brings everything to the role, and leaves behind a performance more memorable than any other this year.

Runner Up: Adarsh Gourav – The White Tiger

In The White Tiger, Adarsh Gourav plays Balram Halwai, an aspiring entrepreneur from a small village in India.

As a member of a lower caste, Halwai is doomed from birth to an uneventful-at-best life in the Indian countryside, with little hope of ever achieving anything more than to become a servant. However, Halwai is ambitious and cunning, seeking out opportunities, and cleverly exploiting them to come out ahead. When he becomes the driver for the rich heir of a politically influential family, Halwai takes advantage of his boss’ naivete to achieve his dreams.

Halwai is shrewd, manipulative, and always willing to sacrifice others to save himself. If Tiger were less careful in its portrayal of his cutthroat bosses, Halwai could easily be the villain of his own film.

While Gourav portrays the morally dubious side of Halwai well, he balances it with an overwhelming likability. Halwai smiles almost constantly, and brownnoses just as much, but manages to in a way that sounds sincere in spirit, if not necessarily in words. When Halwai tells his master he should be a singer, or he could go to the Olympics for tennis, his compliments come across as well-meaning exaggerations, rather than hollow flattery.

In his scenes alone, Gourav sells Halwai’s seething hatred for his country’s systemic issues and building rage against his masters. Halwai is a young man pushed too far in a very real sense, but when he finally snaps, he does so without resorting to blind rage, or hyperbolic violence.

Instead, Halwai insists that he is a social and business entrepreneur, and Gourav sells it.