If I Picked the Winners: Best Supporting Actress 2010

     The 2010 Academy Awards season may be good and done with (culminating to that anti-climatic snoozer of a show on Sunday), but I am going to spend the next few weeks wrapping up this year's Oscars and giving my opinion on who should have won the major awards (although it looks like I won't be able to see "Buitiful" until it comes out to rent, so Best Actor will have to be delayed for awhile). For the first post-Oscar addition of "If I Picked the Winners", I'm going to start with what was seen as the tightest race in the "Big 8" categories going into the night: Best Supporting Actress. For a good long time, the award was all but wrapped up for Melissa Leo's portrait of Alice Ward, the mother of the boxing half-brothers Dickey Eklund (Christian Bale) and Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg) in the film "The Fighter". Then, scandal broke when Melissa Leo put her "homemade" FYC (For Your Consideration) ads in the trade papers, a move that reportedly rubbed some Hollywood insiders the wrong way. The award then seemed to be a toss-up, with many people (including myself) predicting a win for Helena Bonham Carter due to the love for "The King's Speech". In the end though, the "scandal" turned out to be more of an internet story than anything else (or maybe it did tighten up the race significantly, who knows), because Melissa Leo took the stage Sunday night and made ABC's censors earn their keep.

     Despite the apparent competitiveness of the race, in all honesty (as you will come to see momentarily), I was not all that thrilled with this year's line-up. It's true that it may have not been the richest field of any Oscar category of any year ever, but their were some fine performances that the Academy missed. The most noticeable and egregious absence, was that of Lesley Manville's in the wonderful British film, "Another Year". Manville gave one of the best performances of any actress this year (and actor too for that matter), but one of the likely reasons for Manville's MIA status was category confusion, as it was never 100% clear if she should be included in the Best Supporting Actress race or the Best Actress race (in all honesty, I would have put her in the Best Actress race). Another woman I would have liked to seen nominated in this category (and someone that Academy members can't use "category confusion" as an excuse to why she was not nominated) is Mila Kunis for "Black Swan". As the true antagonist in the film (even if it is imagined), her performance really keeps the tension rising at all times, which allows Natalie Portman's performance to be the powerful work that it is and the reason she took home Oscar Gold Sunday night. Finally, even though she never had a prayer in hades to be nominated, I was stunned at the all-out commitment to the role that Ellen Wong gave to her character Knives Chau in the underrated film "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World". Her obsessively devoted fan and ex-girlfriend of Scott Pilgrim helps make it the hilarious film that it is. We have to deal with cards we were given though, so now on to ranking this year's nominees.

5. Amy Adams in "The Fighter"

     I've been a fan of some of Amy Adams's roles in the past (especially her Oscar nominated turn as the good-natured naive nun in "Doubt"), but this is one bandwagon that I can't jump on. Playing an against-type tough-as-nails working class girl who don't take no bulls@$t from no one, Adams appears so overjoyed to be playing a character who isn't sugar sweet, that she lets her stereo-typing run away with her. The result is that her portrayal of Charlene Fleming, Mickey Ward's (Mark Wahlberg) girlfriend at the time of the events of the film, is nothing but a blue collar, bar-tender caricature with no real depth. Unlike the film's other characters, whose emotional motivations we get to learn at least a little about, Adams's Fleming comes off more as a prop, used for two purposes. The first is to cause friction between the family and Mickey. Charlene is one of the instigators that causes Mickey to look out for his own self-interest in terms of his boxing career, which leads him to split from his mother and crack addict half-brother as his management and trainer, respectively. While this feels a bit manipulated, some of the tension caused by the friction between his family and girlfriend does feel authentic and is somewhat captivating, but the second purpose her character serves, the love interest, is predictable and boring as hell. Now "the love interest" has been a plot device since the beginning of motion pictures and when the film is about two people who love each other in a genuine way, it's A-okay, but when "the girl" (because a man as a "love interest" is very rare) is added for the express purpose of romantic bits that will appeal to the ladies, as well as create a change of pace to slow down the film for a moment, the obvious manipulation starts to insult my intelligence. Unfortunately for "The Fighter", Charlene Fleming falls mostly into the latter, which is why Amy Adams ranks last among the nominees in my humble opinion.

4. Jacki Weaver in "Animal Kingdom"

     With enough early and often campaign ads, including another ready-made quote from Rolling Stone's Peter Travers ("Jacki Weaver sets the screen ablaze"), this unknown Australian actress was able to secure a Best Supporting Actress nomination despite her film's small independent status from the "Land Down Under". While many critics gave her high marks for her portrayal as the matriarch of a family of bank robbers, I was not quite so impressed. The bulk of Weaver's screen time (and the part I'm guessing wowed the critics so much) is towards the end of the film, where her character makes some rather cold and calculating decisions. This is actually where the performance began to come of the wheels for me, as the "darker" the situations became, the more self-conscious her performance went. The key to making any great "evil" character is that the villain feels that they are in right at all times. Their morality may differ drastically from ours or societies, but for them, they are simply following their own moral compass. As soon as a character becomes aware of their sinisterness, all shred of emotional honesty evaporates into thin air, and the film becomes almost cartoony. Now I can't say for sure whether it was the writing, directing, or acting, but whatever it was, it ran headlong into this problem with Weaver's Janine Cody, and even if Weaver is not wholly to blame, any actor has to take some responsibility for their performance. The result than is an over-done matriarch, whose goals know no boundaries, that I'm sure audiences have been getting since the times of Shakespeare's Lady MacBeth. The performance, much like the film itself, is a missed opportunity.

3. Hailee Steinfeld in "True Grit"

     A very commonly overused term to describe a mediocre performance is the word "serviceable", but the reason for its prolific use is that it is an extremely apt description in many a case, so I will have to use it yet again as an adjective for Hailee Steinfeld's performance as Mattie Ross in the Coens' "True Grit". While many found the precious performance to be inspired and quaint, it was a bit too so for my tastes, just like the movie itself. Steinfeld delivers her lines like the over-confident babe-in-the-woods she is suppose to be, giving verbal comeuppance to any adult that crosses her path (with the predictable audience reaction: "Can you believe she that?", "I know, she sure showed him!"). This is a tried-and-true character that has made the rounds a few times on the old cinematic block, but it is one I have never really cared for that much. In a rough and tumble setting such as the Wild West, the idea that a teenage girl could always have the last laugh, when in reality any drunk idiot could raise their pistol and drop her dead in a matter of moments (if they didn't feel like raping her first), always comes off as more than a little coy. Obviously this has a lot to do with the writing (I'll never understand why the Coens were so faithful to the source material), but as I just got done explaining in Jacki Weaver's case, every actor has to at least take partial responsibility for their performance, so while Steinfeld may have been doing as she was told, it ultimately was for a futile goal. She does fulfill the stories' narrative (weaknesses and all) though, and she is miles ahead of Kim Darby's version of Mattie Ross in the 1969 adaptation of Charles Potis's "True Grit", so there definitely is some good, but unlike some, she does not rank on the top of my list in the category.

2. Helena Bonham Carter in "The King's Speech"

     While I have made my feelings known about "The King's Speech" (I don't care for it all that much), and I am still pretty disappointed that it managed to win the Oscar for Best Picture, Helena Bonham Carter's performance as the Queen Mother was one of the film's pleasant surprises. Many people (even some who like the film) have derided Tim Burton's wife's performance as flat and unworthy of a nomination, but compared to some of her fellow nominees (cough*Amy Adams*cough, cough*Jacki Weaver*cough), I appreciated the low-key subtlety of Carter's performance. Now I have absolutely no idea what Queen Elizabeth was like in real life, but in a puff-piece film such as "The King's Speech", it doesn't really matter how accurate her portrayal is. The important part is that she serves the purpose the film needs her to and makes the whole film more alive during her scenes, and I have to say, for a film as mediocre as  "The King's Speech", she does a pretty good job. Her concern for her husband's condition (stuttering) is apparent in every line of dialogue she speaks and every action she takes, without every beating us over the head with how much she cares. It's a subtle love, a more honest and sincere love, which is why I am so impressed with her performance. If the relationship between Colin Firth's King George VI and his speech therapist, Geoffrey Rush's Lionel Logue, only had felt as authentic as the relationship between George and his wife, then we may have had the great movie that so many others seem to say we do. Regardless, a good performance is a good performance, and Helena Bonham Carter should be proud of her work (not something I would often say from the bits of her filmography I have seen).

1. Melissa Leo in "The Fighter"

     The Academy didn't get everything wrong Sunday night, and one award I was happy to see was Melissa Leo's victory in Best Supporting Actress. Her brazenness and lack of proper etiquette may rub some the wrong way (it doesn't particularly bother me), but in the end meritocracy won the day with Leo's win for her performance as Alice Ward. Having just criticized Amy Adams and Jacki Weaver for over-the-top performances, some of you, with understandable reasoning, may be crying foul that I put Melissa Leo's performance on top of the heap. Here's the thing though, while you may not run into these folks everyday, there are larger-than-life people in this world such as Leo's Alice Ward. What then, you may ask, is the difference between Leo's flamboyant performance and Adams and Weaver's histrionics? The difference is subtle, but emotional makes a drastic difference. In Leo's case, the small movements or look of the eyes creates a character who's motivations are always clear, even when the Alice Ward is trying to keep them hidden. The result is a fully fleshed out character who is not only serving as some narrative tool, or simply spouting the lines given to her from the God above (the writer), but a spontaneous and somewhat erratic human being whose "got no strings to hold me down". For instance, I would guess that if you interviewed Leo as Alice Ward, so that she was responding from the top of her head and not simply reading dialogue, she would still be able to inhabit Alice Ward and give responses that could be legitimate Alice Ward responses. If you gave the same Turing test to Amy Adams and Jacki Weaver, my guess is that their internal mega-processors (their brain) would show, because they would have to consciously decide what their character could or might say. Leo on the other hand became her character, which is what any good actor/actress should aim to achieve, and which is why I was so happy Sunday night to see the right woman win. Congratulations Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (A.M.P.A.S.), you actually got something right.

     That's it for this week, so until I continue to wrap up this year's show some more next week, leave comments below and vote for who you thought should have won Best Supporting Actress above.