Best Actress 2012

[Sabin]

I haven't seen The Impossible and I likely won't. Don't see that affecting my vote.

Solid lineup. Not a great one. Of the remaining four, two are miscast and two are brilliantly cast. The two who are miscast are Chastain and Lawrence. Chastain is strikingly bad in this role. A strange performance that likely didn't have a chance. Everytime she opened her mouth, I cringed. The combination of that voice and that no-bullshit attitude made Zero Dark Thirty a difficult experience for me to sit through. Jennifer Lawrence is too darn young, but it's one of the best miscast performances I can think of. She's charming and very good in Silver Linings Playbook. But because this is the story of two people falling in love separated by two decades (?), it never quite feels like the great love story it should be. Can't really begrudge her win because she's quite good, but she's wrong for the part.

For me, Wallis and Riva are so perfectly cast in their roles that I can't separate one from the other. At a certain point, Wallis is just a kid being a kid. Riva on the other hand does something different. Given no showy, emotive moments, she captures every note of confusion and terror in losing her faculties. The clear winner.


Best Actress
1. Ann Dowd, Compliance
2. Rosemarie DeWitt, Your Sister's Sister
3. Emmanuel Riva, Amour
4. Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea
5. Hani Furstenberg, The Loneliest Planet

[Cinemanolis]

What a disappointing year for the Best Actress category. Emmanuelle Rive, Marion Cotillard and Jessica Chastain are the obvious contenders for a place in my top 5. However for the remaining 2 places there are a lot of good but not great performances. Mary Elizabeth Winstead was good in a bad film, Maggie Smith was wasted in a mediocre film, Naomi Watts was ok but belonged in the supporting category. I loved "Anna Karenina" but Knightley was the 2nd most problematic element of the film (Johnson was the first), Mirren as usual was the best thing in a bad film and i never even considered Wallis' turn in Beasts as oscar worthy. "Beyond the Hills" "Alps" and "Barbara" featured some strong female characters but i wasn't blown away by the performances. Then i starting considering Ann Dowd, but i hated her film so much that it erased all the virtues of her performance. I even considered putting my supporting actress nominees Helen Hunt and Cecil de France in the Leading category, but in the end the only realistic options for the remaining 2 spots were three: Jennifer Lawrence in a poorly written role (completely agree with Big Magilla) in an overhyped film, Judi Dench who is very good in an enjoyable film and Rachel Weisz who gives a credible performance that left me a feeling of unfullfilment.

1. Riva
2. Chastain
3. Cotillard
4. Weisz
5. Dench/Lawrence

[Reza]

A no brainer. Riva, by far the best of a rather weak lot.

Incidently Hitchcock may have been silly and not helped by Hopkins' stiff performance, weighed down by all that makeup, but Mirren deserved a nomination for her beautifully nuanced performance. Her performance was better than those of all the other nominees on the list save for Riva's.

[Big Magilla]

Now that the 2013 Cannes Film Festival is in full swing it's probably as good a time as any to close the books on the acting choices for 2012.

First up is Best Actress, which I hesitate to do because I suspect a lot of people still haven't seen Amour which was difficult to find in U.S. theatres and still doesn't have a DVD release date here, but I enabled the option to change your vote so if you want to vote now and change your vote after seeing Emmanuelle Riva's performance or for that matter some other performance you find you prefer later on, you can.

For me, there's no other choice than Riva whose performance goes beyond acting to create an indelible portrait of a once vital woman whose sudden and quick deterioration leads her to want to end it, yet who instinctively fights to stay alive as she draws her last breaths. The only question for me was who the year's also-rans ought to have been.

Jennifer Lawrence is Hollywood's golden girl of the moment who gives an earnest performance in what to me was a poorly written role in Silver Linings Playbook. I think she deserved the nomination against less than stellar competition, the only one of the film's four acting nominees who did, but I didn't think she deserved to win over Riva or for that matter, Jessica Chastain, last year's golden girl, who had a much more complex role to play in Zero Dark Thirty. Chastain's character was not easy to like. She was earnest and determined with nary a thought for anything beyond her job, but her performance was far from one-note. It was the film's undeserved political backlash that torpedoed her chances, not the fact that there was a new golden girl who stole her luster. Only time will tell which one lasts longer. My bet is on the classically trained Chastain.

I have no idea whether Quvenzhané Wallis is a good actress or not. She seems like a nice kid, but all she was doing in Beasts of the Southern Wild was play-acting in the year's most overhyped film.

What can I say about Naomi Watts' performance in The Impossible? She had less screen time than some of the nominees in the Best Supporting Actress category. Although her role was fleeting, her performance was decent enough , but I can't help feeling she was holding down a slot - two slots in fact, one as the representative character living through great adversity and one as the year's token British/Australian place holder. A better slot filler in the first instance would have been Marion Cotillard in Rust and Bone who had a far more complex and moving role. but I guess two French actresses speaking in their native tongue would have been too much for the Academy. In the second instance, there was superior work from Rachel Weisz in the intriguing remake of The Deep Blue Sea and Judi Dench as the newly widowed pensioner doing things for herself for the first time in a long time in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, but not, sadly, Helen Mirren in Hitchcock or Maggie Smith in Quartet who had good roles on paper, but not in execution. Mirren was good as Alma Reville, but the plot of Hitchcock was so silly and trivial it defeated even her. Quartet was even sillier and more trivial, a complete waste of time for everyone connected with it.