Movie-wise, 2010 was one of my favorites in recent memory, with many standout, thrilling new images appearing in films by old directors I love, new directors discovered that I admire, and directors that I had previously written off stepping up to their respective games (David O. Russell, I am looking at you, sir). Most of all, 2010 has been a year of constantly pleasant surprises for me, watching performers that I had never truly gotten into soar into new and exciting territory, please see Amy Adams and Christian Bale in my favorite scene of The Fighter or Natalie Portman in Black Swan to illuminate this point. Heading into high Oscar season, its always been a favorite custom of mine to dutifully consider the films that have come and gone over the past year, and hand out my own awards.
For me, this is the most wonderful time of the year, it’s the time where critics across the land put everything that’s gone on in the dark into perspective and order it into “Best Of” lists. We go revisit what – and who – we loved, we thoughtfully scrutinize the calls we’ve made throughout the year, the details and textures of the films at hand, and we finally catch up on those indies that fly under the radar and often elude us. Some of us sit around and watch screeners, but most of us are forced to slog it out in the theater and have to actually pay for the privilege of reviewing the latest releases. It’s tough to make sense of it all, and very hard work to provide fair and balanced coverage with these impediments, but with this year-end look back, I try in earnest to reconstruct what I think were the best of what 2010’s contenders had to offer in all of the major awards categories with as little Hollywood bullshit, publicity team spin, or Oscar-season hoo-ha as possible. That is not my world and I don’t care if I am a part of it or not.
My world is academia, feminist activism, cinephilia and cinema, and that is what the following choices reflect for readers and movie-goers who I think are looking for an onscreen experience that is anything but ordinary. The following lists are for those who have an adventurous mind for movies, and for those who feel most gratified cheering for the underdog or the under-appreciated.
To begin my assessment of the year of film 2010, I will offer you up a riddle: whats black and white and blue all over? The answer is, of course, my top three films of the year.
Best Picture/Top Twenty Films
1. Black Swan
2. Blue Valentine
3. White Material
4. Another Year
5. The Fighter
6. Carlos
7. Mother and Child
8. Winter’s Bone
9. Biutiful
10. Please Give
11. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
12. A Prophet
13. I Am Love
14. Somewhere
15. Mother
16. Fish Tank
17. The Ghost Writer
18. The Social Network
19. Greenberg
20. Shutter Island
Best Supporting Actress
Best Supporting Actress has always been my favorite category for awards because of how unpredictable it can be. You have hard-working character actresses like Maureen Stapleton (Reds) winning awards and stalwarts like Thelma Ritter and Agnes Moorehead collecting nominations throughout their careers with ease. There are also the daffy young ingenues who sweep in from nowhere, pulling voters heartstrings and tickling their funny bones, only to walk away with top honors (think Geena Davis in The Accidental Tourist or Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny). In this category you frequently find leading ladies demoted to the supporting category as a strategy to take out the weaker competition (Jessica Lange in Tootsie, Marcia Gay Harden in Pollock, and Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind) and young ladies in leading roles being demoted to the “lesser” category because of their age (Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker and Tatum O’Neill in Paper Moon). Age is one factor that is broad in this category, which favors mature dames (Peggy Ashcroft [A Passage to India], Maggie Smith [California Suite] and Judi Dench [Shakespeare in Love) and babes in the woods (Anna Paquin [The Piano], to the impossibly nubile (Dorothy Malone [Written on the Wind], Angelina Jolie [Girl, Interrupted]). It’s a wild, wild category where anything can happen, and where the most surprises actually do happen.
Supporting Actress is also the category where Oscar and I disagree the most. I find the Academy’s slate to often be very uninspired, very buzzy-boring, and very expected (with the notable recent exception of Mo’Nique’s win last year for Precious, that is). This year I expect only two of my own choices to match up with the final five nominees come nominations morning, and coincidentally, I interviewed both of these amazing women earlier in the year as a part of PopMatters‘ Essential Performances series: Melissa Leo, who is being touted for The Fighter), and Jacki Weaver, who is being recognized for her stunning work in Animal Kingdom. Leo and Weaver have pretty much wiped the floor with the competition and I have no doubt that one of these brash, blonde, semi-monstrous mamas will go on to eventually take the trophy.
If I were a betting man, I would put money on Leo, simply because she is a well-known American actress with a previous Oscar nomination (for Best Actress in Frozen River) doing career-best, scene-stealing character work in a film that everyone will see and everyone will love, whereas Weaver is in a dark, Aussie indie and plays an outright villain. Leo’s co-star Amy Adams, in a shocking change of pace role that she pulls off flawlessly, is their only major threat but as I see it, both veteran actresses are brilliant and tough industry survivors, and both are due in many ways. So you will hear no complaints from me when one of them eventually ascends to the podium to collect a little gold, bald, naked man.
However, wouldn’t it be lovely in a year where nearly every outlet is bemoaning the dearth of notable roles for women of color – in a year that is being called “The Year of the Actress, no less – for one of the cast members of the misunderstood, overly-vilified For Colored Girls to get some mainstream traction in this race? Tyler Perry is a divisive director and is widely hated by (mostly-male, mostly-white, mostly-older, mostly-straight) film critics, yet his smash successes with audiences proves there is an eager audience out there responding to what he has to say positively, and not giving two shits what some old white dude thinks. Though For Colored Girls has many problems, the women in the film should not be discounted. Phylicia Rashad, better known in certain circles as the iconic Mrs. Claire Huxtable on The Cosby Show, impressed me so much with her command of the source material’s poetic language, and the shaded, mysterious delivery of her character Gilda’s lines. Loretta Devine finally gets a role that suits her flair for fusing comedy and drama, while co-stars Kimberly Elise and Thandie Newton, once so great together in Jonathan Demme’s Beloved, again fire on all cylinders in roles that are very different from anything else either had done in the past. Newton’s floozy Tangie is like Elizabeth Taylor’s Maggie the Cat, oozing sex in a silk slip, and by way of Harlem, while Elise evokes memories of a volcanic young Cicely Tyson.
Some Versatile and Ever-surprising Actors
While it’s depressing that Miranda Richardson (in fact the feminist-minded Made in Dagenham in general) was shut out of competition and that Olivia Williams – who was so amazing in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer – has never been properly lauded in spite of a career of beautifully low-key work for directors like Wes Anderson (Rushmore) and M. Knight Shymalan (The Sixth Sense) is vile, it was still a thrill to see British vet Gemma Jones work with Woody Allen to good effect on You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and to watch Ruth Sheen’s gloriously wry reactions to Lesley Manville’s debauchery in Another Year. Is Oscars affair with more mature English ladies crashing to an end? Please say it isn’t so! Had Manville been campaigned as a supporting actress, this would have been her Oscar to lose.
Oscars track record of nominating young actresses in this category is strong. Besides the aforementioned Duke and O’Neal (who won at ages s16 and ten, respectively), there is fellow winner Anna Paquin who took the statuette home at the ripe old age of eleven for her work in The Piano. Quinn Cummings (The Goodbye Girl), Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine), and Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) were all Oscar nominees years before they could even think about getting driver’s licenses. That the tradition will likely not be upheld this by Elle Fanning, who gives a bravura, natural performance in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere (opposite an equally wonderful Stephen Dorff as her famous actor dad), is unfortunate. Fanning’s work in Coppola’s quietly beautiful, mysterious movie was lovely and she really illuminated her character’s interior in key dramatic scenes and in the more light and funny scenes, making her much more complex than just another boring Hollywood brat. Her ice-skating sequence, set to Gwen Stefani’s song “Cool” is one of my favorites of the year. Sadly for Fanning, the Academy doesn’t really like to give too much space to young ladies, and this year it seems her rightful spot amongst the nominees will be taken by another young woman in a more widely-embraced movie: Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, even though she is clearly the lead of her film, is in nearly every scene, and not really “supporting” anyone.
My winner this year, though, is the versatile, ever-surprising Naomi Watts, mainly for her spot-on turn in Rodrigo Garcia’s excellent Mother and Child, but also for her counterpoint, comedic work in Allen’s film, which shows a different side of the gifted Aussie, who has been nominated for one Oscar previously, as Best Actress for 21 Grams (one of the Academy’s most egregious snubs was to her performance in Mulholland Drive in 2001). As Elizabeth, the confused, fiercely intelligent and independent young lawyer, Watts sets a new standard. She explores each facet of her character, never shying away from being petulant, from being wounded, from being very complicated and human. Elizabeth is prickly, just as her birth mother Karen (Annette Bening), who gave her up for adoption thirty five years ago is, and just as lost. As Watts gorgeously pulls out all of the stops, going from outrageous to arch to venomous within seconds in some scenes, it becomes more and more impossible to think of another actress playing this part, which feels tailor-made for Watts’ custom blend of feminine guile, sensuality and sensibility. She is an actress who gets better and better with each passing year and it feels like the right time to recognize her willingness to take on daring, funny, dark, real women in a variety of films and roles, as she proved this year with her well-played leading turn as Valerie Plame in Fair Game and her supporting roles in Mother and Child and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Strangers. You don’t see too many movie stars pulling that kind of versatility off much these days, so Watts should be commended for her continuing dedication to trying on truly new personalities every year.
1. Naomi Watts … Mother and Child & You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
2. Melissa Leo … Conviction, The Fighter & Welcome to the Rileys
3. Phylicia Rashad … For Colored Girls
4. Jacki Weaver … Animal Kingdom
5. Elle Fanning … Somewhere
6. Amy Adams … The Fighter
7. Kimberly Elise … For Colored Girls
8. Kerry Washington … For Colored Girls & Mother and Child
9. Olivia Williams … The Ghost Writer
10. Miranda Richardson … Made in Dagenham
11. Ruth Sheen … Another Year
12. Thandie Newton … For Colored Girls
13. Loretta Devine … For Colored Girls
14. Barbara Hershey … Black Swan
15. Dale Dickey … Winter’s Bone
16. Gemma Jones … You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
17. Marion Cotillard … Inception
18. Patricia Clarkson … Easy A & Shutter Island
19. Sissy Spacek … Get Low
20. Rebecca Hall … Please Give & The Town
Best Actress
With this category, I was so tempted to include Joan Rivers, who contends in A Piece of Work that she has been playing the character of “Joan Rivers”, and perfecting it, for her entire life (and she is riveting in the film and in the “part”, as an accelerated, meta version of herself). In the end, I decided that performances in non-fiction films, even though they can be just as highly scripted and constructed as those in traditional cinema, will not be eligible to be in this particular conversation about great female acting, especially in one of the finest years for women and womens’ roles – particularly for women over 40 – in at least a decade.
Though Black Swan remains my favorite film of the year, and I earlier this year I had initially thought that star Natalie Portman was unbeatable in this category, subsequent viewings of the Fox Seachlight monster art house hit have revealed to me that while the film no doubt succeeds in part to Portman’s cagey turn as a nutty ballerina, the film is not necessarily all about her performance, as transformative it is. What it’s all about, however, is the luscious spate of technical delights that magician Aronofsky pulls out of his director’s hat, it’s about what film critic Tom Gunning referred to as “the aesthetics of astonishment,” about the spectacle of the film as a whole, but not entirely about the central performance of Nina, as competent and revealing as Portman is. The actress remains in my number three slot for her daring, dark work, but she ends up being bested for the runner up spot by veteran British actor Lesley Manville in Mike Leigh’s tremendous Another Year, a film that gets better and better as time goes by. Manville’s performance as the wasted Mary is the stuff of Giulietta Masina-like legend, though in terms of the Oscar derby, it looks as though the actress may be a) eclipsed by more well-known stars and b) become a victim of category confusion as her all-eyes-on-me role straddles that tenuous line between key supporting player and leading lady.
But when I really sat down and poured thought into who this year’s best, most exploratory work was from, all signs kept pointing back to Nic and Jules – aka Annette Bening and Julianne Moore aka the two greatest American actresses of their generation. It would be an outright crime to not recognize these women in this year, and to recognize them separately borders on a capital offense. Three time Oscar nominee Bening has received the lion’s share of kudos for her work in Lisa Cholodenko’s tonally-confused Focus offering The Kids are All Right, which was a modest art house hit over the summer, but co-star Moore has been routinely given the shaft during the awards gambit this year (though she is a widely-respected four-time previous Academy Award nominee). Many pundits speculate that it’s because of the two central female characters – who happen to be everyday lesbian moms in a relationship and family crisis – Moore is given the more unlikable and unsympathetic of the two: the cheater, the transgressor. Though Bening’s doctor-breadwinner is just as brash and unlikable at times, as well as prone to fits of red wine-fueled uber-bitchery, her position is one more voters can likely empathize with. Artistic collaboration between two people at the top of their games is already intoxicating enough to see in practice, but the chemistry that occurs between Bening and Moore is effortless, and like Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Thelma and Louise or Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment, its not really possible to spotlight one performance without at least considering the other.
Pure Electricity and Star Charisma
Bening and Moore, coincidentally, also turned in two other less-noted performances this year that only solidify their legends as two of the finest working actresses in America right now. It’s essential that these more off-the-beaten path turns be remembered alongside their work in The Kids are All Right. Moore’s erudite turn in Atom Egoyan’s overly-lambasted Chloe is much better, more refined, and more interesting than most people are giving her credit for, while Bening, I have heard many a critic argue, and I completely agree with, is even better in Rodrigo Garcia’s beautiful Mother and Child. Playing a lonely, sour middle-aged woman who was forced to give her baby up at age 14, and who has been empty ever since, Bening hits a career high. It’s a fearless, breathtaking performance of a character who, despite the steely facade, is pure tremulous vulnerability beneath. As she rounds the impossibly melodramatic edges of the story out carefully, we see flashes of pure electricity in Bening’s eyes that recall the evil twinkle of conwoman Myra Langtree in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters or the cool yuppie dissatisfaction of Carolyn Burnham, another conwoman of sorts, in American Beauty. Moore, speaking of self-referencing, evokes the haunted, raw sexuality and dissatisfaction of Amber Waves in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, as well as the catalog of women she has played over the course of her career who have challenged the spectator’s conventional wisdom about female sexuality. These are two of the best, at the heights of their respective powers, to ignore them is foolish, so I will not: I hereby declare my Best Actress prize to be a tie between Bening and Moore for their inspiring work this year and across their filmographies.
Looking at some international art house successes, it makes me heartsick to know that these women from all corners of the globe don’t stand a chance at Oscar hosannas. Though she did recently pull a surprise win from the Los Angeles Film Critics as Best Actress, Mother‘s Kim Hye-ja is still obviously very much a Hollywood outsider, despite a long, prestigious career in Korea. Isabelle Huppert has somehow (shamefully) never been nominated by the Academy (a la her countrywoman Jeanne Moreau), so her bold turn in Claire Denis’ White Material probably isn’t the right vehicle to bring her a first nomination. Isabelle Adjani is a French actress who has fared better than most of her contemporaries – with two Oscar nominations as Best Actress for The Story of Adele H. (1975) and Camille Claudel (1989) – but her powerhouse professor in Skirt Day is probably too edgy for traditional Academy voters’ taste. Danish actress Paprika Steen’s performance in Applause showcases it’s leading lady by not only giving her the chance to play a recovering alcoholic actress, but also the alcoholic version in flashbacks while she plays Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on stage. Talk about a tour de force. Steen was pure electricity and star charisma in the role.
Then we have the fabulous Tilda Swinton, whom I had the extreme pleasure of interviewing earlier this year, in I Am Love. In the film, Swinton speaks Italian and Russian, casts all vanity aside, and uses her expressive face in the film’s near-wordless passages to convey more with a glance than most performers do with an entire script. When you look at her haunting, almost silent film-quality acting in comparison to her leonine, bonkers-in-the-best-way work in last year’s Julia, the question needs to be asked: what in the hell does Tilda Swinton – one of the most adventurous, thoughtful actresses making movies today – need to do to get another freaking Oscar nomination? Surely Oscars are the last thing from Tilda’s mind, and during my interview with her she let slip that she had no idea what had happened at the ceremony the year before, but still, to not reward risks like the ones she takes in I Am Love feels like a huge step backwards, in terms of the Oscar’s credibility.
It’s interesting to note the presence of a dynamic range of younger female actors doing very interesting character work in the past year, many are teenage girls going on impossible journeys, who take center stage and more than acquit themselves. Even though I wasn’t as terribly impressed as my fellow critics were with newcomer Hailee Steinfeld’s debut as Mattie Ross in the Coens’ True Grit (clearly leading performance, not supporting as it’s ludicrously being campaigned), there was still thankfully Jessica Chastain, Katie Jarvis, Jennifer Lawrence, Noomi Rapace, Emma Stone, and especially Michelle Williams (the most brilliant actress of her generation), pouring their souls into sharp characterizations, while Catherine Keener’s addled mom in Please Give is trying to provide sound guidance to her teenage daughter throughout her film. These young ladies – and their moms – need to be given credit for illuminating the teenage and young adult female experience in magnificent new ways in a time where most entertainment geared towards young women is often devoid of wit, heart, charm, humor or brains, or simply not geared towards young women at all.
It was a banner year for women in film, where ladies of all ages have showed up, in force and en masse, to the movies – and the industry is finally starting to change for them. It’s an exciting time. Now we just need to have a year that isn’t all about white actresses exclusively. Besides Hye-ja 2010 has not been a stellar year for women of color in leading roles. To that effect, Kerry Washington’s understated, strong work in Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us, a tough look at how the militant activism of the Black Panthers affected black communities in the 1970s, is a nice step in the right direction, and Washington’s game work in not only this film, but also in supporting roles in Mother and Child and For Colored Girls, is purely delightful to watch.
2. Lesley Manville … Another Year
3. Natalie Portman … Black Swan
4. Michelle Williams … Blue Valentine
5. Paprika Steen … Applause
6. Tilda Swinton … I Am Love
7. Isabelle Huppert … White Material
8. Kim Hye-ja … Mother
9. Isabelle Adjani … Skirt Day
10. Catherine Keener … Please Give
11. Katie Jarvis … Fish Tank
12. Emma Stone … Easy A
13. Jennifer Lawrence … Winter’s Bone
14. Nicole Kidman … Rabbit Hole
15. Noomi Rapace … The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
16. Kerry Washington … Night Catches Us
17. Sally Hawkins … Made in Dagenham
18. Jessica Chastain … Jolene
19. Sylvie Testud … Lourdes
20. Patricia Clarkson … Cairo Time
Note: One performance I would have loved to have seen before we went to press is Halle Berry in her Golden Globe-nominated turn in Frankie & Alice. Multiple requests to screen the film were made to both the film’s production company and to the film’s publicists went unanswered. Oh well, Best Actress is full enough without me having to beg someone to screen a turkey, and without the always hit or miss – mainly miss – Berry pulling out all of the Actress! stops playing a stripper with multiple personality disorder, one of which is a white racist.
Our Leading Men of 2010
Listed below – because, hey, feminism is all about equality, right? – are my choices in the other major awards categories. Yes, there is even room for the men of the Best Actor and Supporting Actor categories here at Suffragette City!
Best Director
1. Darren Aronofsky .. Black Swan
2. Derek Cianfrance … Blue Valentine
3. Claire Denis … White Material
4. Mike Leigh … Another Year
5. Olivier Assayas … Carlos
6. Debra Granik … Winter’s Bone
7. David O. Russell … The Fighter
8. Alejandro González Iñárritu … Biutiful
9. Rodrigo Garcia … Mother and Child
10. Jacques Audiard … A Prophet
11. Luca Guadagnino … I Am Love
12. Andrea Arnold … Fish Tank
13. Bong Joon-ho ,,, Mother
14. Roman Polanski … The Ghost Writer
15. David Fincher … The Social Network
16. Martin Scorsese … Shutter Island
17. Christopher Nolan … Inception
18 Nicole Holofcener … Please Give
19. Sofia Coppola … Somewhere
20. Ben Affleck … The Town
Best Screenplay
1. Blue Valentine
2. White Material
3. Please Give
4. Mother and Child
5. Another Year
6. The Fighter
7. A Prophet
8. Winter’s Bone
9. The Social Network
10. Black Swan
Best Ensemble Cast
1. The Fighter
2. Mother and Child
3. Another Year
4. Please Give
5. Black Swan
6. Winter’s Bone
7. For Colored Girls
8. Shutter Island
9. Biutiful
10.You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Best Supporting Actor
1. Christian Bale … The Fighter
2. Jeremy Renner … The Town
3. Michael Fassbender … Fish Tank
4. Niels Arestrup … A Prophet
5. John Hawkes … Winter’s Bone
6. Jim Broadbent … Another Year
7. Matt Damon … True Grit
8. Pierce Brosnan … The Ghost Writer
9. Armie Hammer … The Social Network
10. Mark Ruffalo … The Kids Are All Right & Shutter Island
Best Actor
1. Ryan Gosling … Blue Valentine
2. Javier Bardem … Biutiful
3. Jesse Eisenberg … The Social Network
4. Tahar Rahim … A Prophet
5. Edgar Ramirez … Carlos
6. Mark Wahlberg … The Fighter
7. Stephen Dorff … Somwhere
8. Ben Stiller … Greenberg
9. Leonardo DiCaprio … Inception & Shutter Island
10. Ben Affleck … The Town