By Nick Carrabine
NCarrabine@News-Herald.com

Ryan Gosling, who sits comfortably at No. 2 on my man crush list, is looking to have the biggest year of his career in 2011.

The 29-year-old hasn’t appeared in a movie since the critically acclaimed Lars and the Real Girl in 2007 — which came just a year after being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as a drug-addicted, inner city school teacher in Half Nelson.

According to his imdb.com page, Gosling’s two newest movies, All Good Things and Blue Valentine will get limited releases by the end of this year. The latter of which is garnering more talk about the young actor receiving another nod for an Academy Award.

Gosling has always been a phenomenal talent, the problem is, he isn’t considered a mainstream actor and not too many people outside of film snobs know who he is - other than being “that guy from The Notebook” - which makes me cringe.

Gosling doesn’t like to make big major studio films with big budgets with other big name actors, in fact, on his quote page on imdb, he’s quoted as saying:

“I understand the studios, in the sense that if they’re going to spend $100 million on a film, they want to make sure they’re gonna get that back. But I don’t know how to guarantee you you’re going to make that money back, and I’m uncomfortable working with those kind of numbers...There is this idea in Hollywood, and I’ve seen it work for people, where the unspoken rule is ‘Do two for them and one for yourself.’ And that’s kind of considered a fact. I’ve never really found that to be true for me. I’ve gotten more opportunities out of working on things I believed in than I ever did on things that weren’t special to me.”

Even if Gosling isn’t nominated for an Academy award in February of 2011, I guarantee you he’ll be in the conversation.

It also seems he is opening up about taking bigger studio films as he is scheduled to release three more movies in 2011, which would make it the biggest year of the young actor’s career.

In April, he’ll star in his first comedy with Steve Carell, Kevin Bacon, Marisa Tomei and Emma Stone called Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Currently he’s filming another movie set to be released in 2011 called Drive, about a Hollywood stunt performer who moonlights as a wheelman discovers that a contract has been put on him after a heist gone wrong, according to IMDB.com

And what might be the biggest role of his career, he is currently in negotiations for the starring role in George Clooney’s Farragut North, which also stars Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti.

According to imdb, Farragut North is about an idealistic staffer for a newbie presidential candidate who gets a crash course on dirty politics during his stint on the campaign trail. It would undoubtedly be released in time for the 2012 Oscar season, which means a November or December 2011 release.

Below is the trailer for Blue Valentine, which review after review from critics is being described as an extremely depressing film about a young couple’s divorce with outstanding performances from Gosling and Michelle Williams.