You've Seen Him In: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) If you follow film with any kind of regularity, by now you've surely heard of Oscar Isaac, the Guatemalan actor and musician who many pegged as a potential 2014 Oscar frontrunner for the role of the titular sad sack folksinger in the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis. If you saw the Oscars, you surely noticed that he was nowhere to be seen; that is, unfortunately, the usual fate of actors in this vein. Regardless, Isaac's performance was empathic and enormous, the sort of star-making turn that would've cemented him as a peer of Pacino's or De Niro's if it debuted forty years earlier. Building off of strong performances in Drive and the otherwise forgettable 2010 Robin Hood, Isaac is hopefully headed to a career where he doesn't make lists like this anymore; some of the other entrants would, sadly, put forward compelling counter-narratives to that idea. The Role He Needs: If you'd asked me this a year ago, I would've said Llewyn Davis; that obviously isn't the case. I'm going to throw a curveball on this one: cast him in the new Star Wars trilogy. Make him a pilot for the New Republic or something. He's handsome, he's talented, and with the right platform, he'll be a huge star.
