If I Picked the Winners: Best Actress 2010

     I finally conclude my 2010 Oscar coverage with a ranking of this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Actress. With the dearth of well-written roles for woman over the last few decades, Best Actress commonly isn't the star-studded affair it use to be when you had the likes of Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia De Havilland, and Ingrid Bergman competing for the Oscar. Also, the movie's from which the Best Actress nominees come from a far more typically smaller, lesser known films than the one's their leading male counterparts are nominated for. In fact, over the last twenty years, only three Best Pictures winners have also won the Oscar for Best Actress ("The Silence of the Lambs", "Shakespeare in Love", and "Million Dollar Baby"), and seven times the winner of the category came from a film that wasn't even nominated for Best Picture. Leading up to this nominations, the buzz on the street was how robust this year's Best Actress category was. As the awards season came into clear view though, a lot of the pre-proclaimed "award worthy" performances didn't pan out, and while it still was an above-par year compared to recent award seasons, we still ended up with three nominees from movies very little people actually saw, and two from movies that were not apart of the Best Picture race.

     For my own personal nominees ballot, there are not a lot of names that jump out begging for replacing of the actual nominees with one great exception: Lesley Manville in "Another Year". Of course, as I have stated before, the likely reason for her absence from being included in Oscar's big party is category confusion. It was hard for many people to decide whether she belonged in the Best Supporting Actress category, or as a lead in the Best Actress category, and her lackluster campaign did really get a clear message across as to which category people should vote for her. Her role in the film is a genuinely tough one to categorize, but had I been able to vote, I think I would have included her as a Best Actress nominee. It really is a shame she was not included in one of the two categories though, because she gave the best performance of any female this year. The only other performance that I might have included instead of some of the other nominees is Julianne Moore in "The Kids Are All Right". While the woman who played her partner was nominated, Annette Bening (who did give the better performance in my opinion), a large part of the film was about the interaction between the two ladies, so it would have been fitting for both of them to have received nominations. Getting two lead nominations from the same film though is an extremely rare occurrence, so it was not too surprising only one of them received a Best Actress nomination. Enough speculating about the "could of"s and "should of"s, let's get on to the actual nominees.

5. Nicole Kidman in "Rabbit Hole"

     Nicole Kidman lives and breathes in the melodrama territory, which means as a general critic of the genre, you won't see me signing up to be the president of the "Nicole Kidman Fanclub" anytime soon. I find her performances quite often to be too self-conscious and mannered for my taste, and the movies she appears in are usually worse than that (the wretched "Little Children" is one of the most embarrassingly terrible films I have seen in recent years). Surprisingly though, "Rabbit Hole" is an effective movie (especially relative to it's typical peers), and this is in part to a decent performance from Nicole Kidman. The strongest part of the film, and Kidman's performance, is in her interaction with the young man who accidentally killed her young boy in a tragic traffic accident. The interaction between the two characters is very tepid, almost laid back, as neither person (especially the young man) knows quite how to act in this situation. As the frequency of the meetings grow though, both characters are able to become slightly more comfortable with one another, engaging in real meaningful conversations that serve as a cathartic process for both people. As good as her performance is in these scenes though, they are some painfully weak moments whenever she has to show how bitter and angry she is. During the confrontational climax of the film, when after nipping and biting at one another throughout the film, Nicole Kidman and Aaron Ekhart's husband and wife characters finally have it out, all of Kidman's "I'm angry" mannerisms come off as painfully premeditated and non-naturalistic. In all parts of the film where she is portraying her bitterness, something just doesn't click right. While this sort of response to the death of a young child is definitely plausible, something about Kidman's portrayal is just too self-aware, someone imitating a devastated grieving mother instead of inhabiting that character. Overall, Kidman's performance is a mixed bag. When she's good, she's good; when she's bad, she's bad. The good probably outshines the bad by a small margin, but not enough for me to rank her above any of her fellow nominees.

4. Michelle Williams in "Blue Valentine"

     "Blue Valentine" wasn't very widely distributed or seen by the larger movie-going public, but from the moment the film started touring the festival circuit, buzz immediately began to swell around the film's two lead performances by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. It was an uphill battle the whole way (including an initial NC-17 rating controversy), but when the nominees were announced, the film managed to be half way successful, securing a nomination for Michelle Williams, but failing to do the same for Ryan Gosling. I found the choice a bit bewildering, because of the two performances I definitely felt Gosling's was stronger, but Williams performance was by no means suspect. Playing the same role at two different points in a relationship (it's magically irreverent beginnings and its bitter solemn ending), Williams quite understated performance portrays a woman making lemonade out of lemons, doing the best she can under difficult circumstances. The result is a doomed relationship of obsessive admiration on one side, and not fully requited love on the other. Williams gives her character the feel of someone always on guard, holding something back, which makes sense given the household she was raised in and her hurried relationship with Gosling's character, but it is also alienates her from the audience, making it hard to sympathize with her as much as you want to. It may have not been written in the script, or maybe Derek Cianfrance purposefully directed Williams to act this way, but there was some spark of shared humanity that missing from her character which makes me hesitant to heap as much praise on the performance that others have. The only moment where we even get a hint at any sense of humor from Williams character is in her hilariously dark joke about a boy and a pedophile who are walking in the woods, but other than this her character is unfortunately distant. It's a good performance, but there is just something lacking from making it the emotional punch in the gut it was meant to be, which is why I rank it fourth among the nominees.

3. Jennifer Lawrence in "Winter's Bone"

     Jennifer Lawrence's performance as Ree in the indie darling of the year, "Winter's Bone", was roundly declared this year's breakout performance, and it was an impressive turn. Playing a teenage girl from an impoverished family in the Ozark mountains of Missouri, Ree is forced to become the "man of the house" after her father puts up their household for bail and then is nowhere to be found. In order to keep the house from going into foreclosure, so that she can maintain a roof over the head of her younger brother and sister, along with her emotional shot mother, Ree is forced to do some investigative digging into the dark criminal underbelly of her extended family's crystal meth business. The unwritten rules of the land are "look straight ahead and don't ask questions", so the perturbation caused by Ree's inquiries into her father's whereabouts are none too welcome by her larger hillbilly family that is far from the warm "milk and cookie" variety that many associate with the word. Determined not to let her family become completely destitute, Ree perseveres with the reluctant help from her uncle Teardrop, despite the mounting threat from her drug-dealing kin. This undeterred perseverance ("true grit" you might even say, to borrow a saying from one of the year's other Oscar contenders) is the most memorable feature of Lawrence's performance. Whatever comes her way, she stays the course, willing to do what is necessary (even if it means losing her life) in order to save the land and house she lives on. This is not only communicated through Lawrence's dialogue, but also through her eyes, as her determined stare never once wavers. The only weakness (if you want to call it that) that keeps me from ranking the performance higher, is this one-note is pretty much all there is to the performance. The movie is the cinematic equivalent of Donkey Kong perpetually throwing barrels for Mario to jump over, and we never get to see Lawrence's Ree out of Mario-mode. It's still a great performance though, and the name Jennifer Lawrence is one that you will be hearing for years to come.

2. Annette Bening in "The Kids Are All Right"

          Playing the stricter, more responsible half of a lesbian couple (or to put it in traditionally stereotypical terms, "the man half"), Annette Bening's role is one of the keys to the film's success. She basically plays the consistently underrated role of the "straight man" (I promise you no pun is intended), with all the more care-free characters, such as the two children, Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo, are wrecking her most carefully laid out plans. In any comedy, it is a tougher role to play than people think, because while you must appear exacerbated by all the mishaps caused by the people around you, if you come across as too much of a downer, it becomes impossible for the audience to sympathize with you. The role is made all the more complicated by the fact that "The Kids Are All Right" is not a straight up comedy, but a dramedy, which means Bening also had the responsible of bringing at least partial realism to the character, and this is where her performance shined the most. I imagine it was very tempting to portray her as a holier-than-thou character who was nothing but a complete victim in the narrative's tale of infidelity and betrayal, but Bening smartly resists these urges and instead opted to create a fully functioning human being, flaws and all. Bening's character is quite annoying at times. She nags at everyone in the household and meets the textbook definition of a control freak, but it is actually these flaws that allow the audience to relate with her character (even if they don't particularly like her) and then sympathize with her later on. When she discovers her partner's unfaithfulness, instead of righteous indignation (an all too common choice for film and television shows dealing with infidelity), Bening's character is genuinely hurt and lost for answers. The reaction yet again humanizes her character, showing a vulnerability and weakness we did not see before. Smart decisions and believable execution such as these examples illustrate fine craftsmanship on Bening's part in this movie. She did not quite make it to the top of my list, but had she won, it is a turn that would have been worthy of the saying "Academy Award winning performance".

1. Natalie Portman in "Black Swan"

    Other than the aforementioned categorically ambiguous performance from Lesley Manville in "Another Year", there was no female character that drew me into her world and predicament as much as Natalie Porman's performance as Nina Sayers in "Black Swan". In this supernatural gothic thriller set in the highly competitive world of New York City Ballet, Nina must make the tough decision between grounded sanity and artistic sincerity. At the beginning of the film, Portman's Nina is about as sweet and naive as some her age could be (probably unrealistically so for some one who has made it as far as she had already, but then again, "Black Swan" ain't about realism, to put it mildly), but as we watch Alice plummet deeper into the proverbial rabbit hole, it becomes apparently clear that there is no getting off this acid trip. The pressure Nina feels from all sides is extremely intense (like the water being held back by the Hoover Dam), and the at first subtle deterioration of the human mind caused by this sort of pressure is handled with appropriate intenseness on Portman's part. She does her best to handle it all in stride, but soon wholes begin the spring in the dike, and the stress begins to manifest itself in strange ways. The important part of Natalie Portman's performance is to never let on that she even has the slightest clue to what is really happening. The slightest wink of the eye throws the whole thing off, but Natalie does not for one second show her hand and play for camp, keeping the audience riveted to their seats. The only part where her performance begins to tear at the seams, and this is especially true for the movie as a whole, is in it's over-the-top and all too fitting finale, where it starts to become a bit predictable. As Nina completely lose her mind, the insanity is laid on a bit thick by Portman, but I believe the problem lies more with the script and direction than her performance. Despite this small criticism, Portman's is a wonderfully captivating performance, creating one of the best heroines in modern cinema.

     Since I have still not been able to catch a viewing of the Spanish film "Buitiful" (that gave Javier Bardem another Oscar nomination for Best Actor), I will not be able to do a 2010 Best Actor edition of this article next week, meaning for the foreseeable future, this concludes my coverage of the 2010 Oscars. Hopefully you have enjoyed reading my opinions of the award season (even if you disagreed with them), and until next week (where I will be going back into Oscar history), feel free to vote for your favorite Best Actress nominee of 2010.