Sean Penn Earns The Oscar

With Sean Penn, there is forever the sense that he has demons of his own to beat back before he can slip underneath the skin of whatever character is awaiting dissection on the table in front of him.

And so it felt with the movie 'Milk', that there were wounds that he needed to suffer through first to excavate the soul of the slain San Francisco politician and gay-rights activist Harvey Milk.

It was a transformative journey, and Penn took all of us along with him, from the grit of a subway hookup to the emerging idealism of the martyr he was to become.

Though Penn has countless performances from the searing to the sublime, 'Milk' became the crucible that would test him, revealing a new essential core of complexity within an already complex actor's actor.