Oscars 2004: If We Picked the Winners (Best Actor)

1. Don Cheadle - Hotel Rwanda Like the previous two actors, Don Cheadle had the Oscar-advantageous fortune to play a non-fictional character, one Paul Rusesabagina, the real life manager of Sabena Hotel des Mille Collines during the genocide in Rwanda during the mid-1990s. For Cheadle though, unlike DiCaprio and Foxx, very few people actually knew the man he was playing, so the responsibility and temptation on both Cheadle and director Terry George to get down the semantics of the character was much diminished compared to some of their competition. The result is a sort of creative freedom that does not speak to the trivial facts of a human being's life, but to the man himself, which in turn reaches all of our shared humanity. As a whole, this is what the film does well. For a message film, Hotel Rwanda manages surprisingly to not focus on all the broader political implications, wisely deciding to put the audience in the position of a man trying all he can to save his family and friends. Cheadle does this with stunning deftness, as he rarely goes off into morally indignant tangents. And why is this? Because in a disastrous situation such as the Rwandan genocide, you don't have time to think about something as abstract as morality. The only thing you can think about is how I can survive, and it is this laser like focus on survival that makes Cheadle's performance shine. Whether through his words or a simple glance from his eyes, Cheadle maintains Paul Rusesabagina throughout the film, never once deviating from the center of his character. We never see Cheadle thinking as an actor. There are no self-conscious decisions about taking the character in this direction or that direction, he simply exists in the world given to him. In fact, there are really only one or two moments of self-reflection for the character in the film, and even calling these moments "self-reflection" is a bit of a stretch. They're more moments where the emotional weight of the situation is just too much for any one man to bear, even one as strong as the film's Paul Rusesabagina. In these brutally honest "moments of weakness" (for lack of a better term), Cheadle again does not call attention to himself, but plays it straight to a most powerful reaction. I wish the film and Cheadle's performance had received more kudos from awards bodies around the industry, but it is slights like this that make it fun writing these articles. If it were up to me, Cheadle would have won the Oscar, but I can guarantee 2004 will not be the last time that a Jaime Foxx as Ray Charles beats a Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina. It's just in the Academy's blood. What ranking would you put these performances in and what other performances from 2004 would you have nominated? Let me know in the comments section below.