Kevin Bacon has been plugging away in movies since making his big-screen debut in 1978's highly problematic comedy classic "National Lampoon's Animal House," and has been in so many different kinds of films over the last 47 years that there's a trivia game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, that essentially holds him as the center of the cinema universe. While you can't make as many movies as Bacon has without appearing in more than a few stinkers, I don't think I've ever seen the man give a poor performance. He's been believable as heroes, villains, creeps and milquetoasts, and, despite getting cast in numerous Oscar contenders, has never competed for an Academy Award himself. That's gotta change.

The only bad thing I can say about his most recent project, "The Bondsman," is that it won't get him off the Oscar schneid. That's because it's a streaming horror series for Amazon Prime...