For well over 40 years, Denzel Washington has been dazzling audiences with one superb performance after another. (He was the goods from the start, even when he was paying his dues in the remarkably wrong-headed "Carbon Copy." ) He's clearly one of our greatest living actors, and he appears to be having the time of his life mixing up his commercial efforts with serious artistic pursuits. And he gets infinity cool points by insisting on staying on the "Late Show with David Letterman" couch so he could get roasted by Don Rickles.

There have been disappointments along the way, some of them profound (like Columbia Pictures fumbling the launch of Washington's Easy Rawlins franchise ). For me, there are few Hollywood sins less forgivable than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

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