Best of 2013: Picture & Lead Actress

Alright, it's time to finish this thing. Saved my favorite category for second-to-last:

Best Actress

• Amy Adams for American Hustle, for discharging precarious poise, mettle, craftiness and vulnerability where it counts, dizzyingly juggling accents, registers, allegiances and personas and believably making us wonder whether she's pulling one over on the eccentric cast of characters or herself.

• Adèle Exarchopoulos for Blue is the Warmest Color, for fully assimilating the film's French title (The Life of Adèle) and not only painting us a full, insatiable portrait of the titular character's sexual awakening but also richly vivifying each little lived-in detail about her.

• Margarethe Tiesel for Paradise: Love, for injecting such odd empathy into Seidl's pitiless observations and conceptions while portraying the middle-aged woman's desperation with a complex, unnerving chaser of self-sabotage and self-deception, cajoling her lovers to lie to her, emotionally and physically.

• Robin Weigert for Concussion, for keeping sex scenes, quotidian interactions and relationships alive and informative of character, showing us a candid, unassuming take on the Restless, Unfulfilled Housewife and neither condescending to nor sugarcoating Abby's agitations or frustrations.

• Shailene Woodley for The Spectacular Now, for refusing to furnish Aimee with any diamond-in-the-rough padding, sweetly and honestly playing an intelligent, lovely-but-ordinary young girl who deserves happiness and earns our admiration for her.

Honorable Mentions to Sandra Bullock & Melissa McCarthy for The Heat, the latter of which obtained the most plaudits between the two for her signature brilliance in boldfaced but revealing comedic stylings, but is evenly matched by the former's diligent, wonderfully subversive straight-lady repackaging of her comic persona. Bonus points to both for deciding to build a study of blooming female friendships around the generic pastiche of mismatched buddy-cop comedies and adding lovely edges of warmth and character-specific detail; Rachel Mwanza, who navigates War Witch's tricky, clear-eyed approach to its subject and lends the film its most sobering moments of introspection, taking Komona through a harrowing journey and circling back with an emotional sucker-punch of melancholy and newfound hope; Anne Dorval and Suzanne Clèment both excel in I Killed My Mother and Laurence Anyways, respectively, two separate films from Xavier Dolan (the first being his 2010 debut that wasn't realeased commercially in the U.S. until 2013) that serve as trenchant actressing springboards in both cases; Meryl Streep, who shocks the world and turns in a pretty great performance for once in August: Osage County, undertaking a Big, juicy role to be sure, which is a little concerning after the surprising humanity of Hope Springs, but the showboating feels more appropriate here than it did in The Iron Lady, and she adds a lot of compelling facets to the theatricality that's required of her; Cate Blanchett, who's also saddled with a mammoth of a part in Blue Jasmine; a mammoth of a part, like Streep's, that I'm not entirely convinced is honestly conceived as-written, but Blanchett manages to make Jasmine's hemmed-in characteristics of surface instabilities cohere through sheer force of charisma and cubistic vitality, single-handedly making Jasmine Allen's most fascinating protagonist since those acridly confrontational couples from Husbands and Wives; and Julie Delpy, whose inimitable luminosity is key to making Before Midnight's existence necessary, resuming her warm, funny and thistly portrait of Celine with new marital baggage and hurdles and understandably being loath to succumb to either. And those are just the ones that were fighting for third/fourth/fifth spots.

I also loved Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha, Brie Larson in Short Term 12, Danai Gurira in Mother of George, Rosario Dawson in Trance, Veerle Baetans in The Broken Circle Breakdown, Jane Adams in All the Light in the Sky, Amanda Seyfried in Lovelace, Chiarra Mastroianni in Bastards, and Rooney Mara in Side Effects.

Best Picture

• 12 Years a Slave, for offering us the kind of bold, emotionally enveloping artistry that we often deny our "Prestige" studio fare or austere (and, in this case, oft-neglected) subject matter and managing to let it enrich and marry both.

• The Act of Killing, for finding ways to conceive a probing and ruminative film around one man's obscene past, even when bravely (if somewhat problematically) eschewing context and siphoning formal power through its subject's disturbing interpretations.

• Bastards, for sort of being Trouble Every Day all over again, with even queasier (and more soberingly earthbound) implications towards upper-class French society and domineering men, finding in one man's suicide another's gradual descent into sordidness and deception.

• The Bling Ring, for being an unexpectedly spry opportunity for its director to mix up her aesthetic and tackle different angles of humor and perspective, and serving as a vessel for heterogeneous characters and thematically vital stylistic surfeit.

• Inside Llewyn Davis, for showing the Coens' "softer" side while remaining an intriguing and honest encapsulation of their recurring themes, moods and interests, considering their established strengths and weaknesses in exploring all three.

• Leviathan, for pure sensory transference that immerses its audience in an endless cycle of environmental nightmares and a haunting nautical milieu, matching even the likes of Gravity in how-do-they-do-that visual chutzpah.

• Like Someone in Love, for continuing Kiarostami's hot streak in involving and intellectually playful two-handers, without feeling like he's overplaying his hand or exploring familiar territory, carefully measured in thought and skepticism.

• Mother of George, for having the technical temerity to tell a story of systemized cultural mechanics through apt stylistic panache, using it to enhance rather than undermine emotions and character development from the script.

• Paradise: Love, for detailing the Sugar Mama sex tourism scene in Kenya and linking it to a brutal and scathing tale of one woman providing men lessons in skilled manipulation over her own emotions, sneaking potent doses of empathy.

• The Selfish Giant, for steeping one foot in tacit acknowledgement of its titular inspiration and the other in valiantly suffocating subject matter finding ways for both to intersect, dramatize and oddly reflect one another.

Honorable Mentions begin with that frustratingly close #11 spot, Blue Caprice, and then move on to more festival holdovers from prior years like War Witch, I Killed My Mother, I Want Your Love, and In the Fog. All five have had durable staying power for me, and might even move higher on the list if I were to give them another whirl. And then Before Midnight, which had the potential to be in the top 10 if not for those prominent quibbles that I talked about in the Screenplay category, but the effortless elasticity of its two leads go a long way in helping it succeed, and it definitely does more right than it does wrong. You can see what else I liked and how I'd rank the actual nominees by visiting my Top 10 list.

And that's it for the personal ballot! I really hope that anyone who's been reading has enjoyed it, and even if you haven't been enjoying it, don't be shy! Leave a comment with your own favorites. I'm especially interested in your choices for Best Actress and anything you feel that I might have overlooked.

Now that we can move on from 2013, stay tuned for more topical posts that I have in the works.

Best of 2013: Lead Actor

Best Actor

• Bradley Cooper for American Hustle, for emanating qualities of overconfidence, hot-tempered eagerness and misguided intentions that are barely contained or aware of themselves, equaling his SLP performance in tonal acrobatics while achieving a generous rapport with his castmates.

• Oscar Isaac for Inside Llewyn Davis, because it's hard to imagine the film clicking as strongly as it does without his presence, bearing a lifetime's worth of (self-induced) misfortune and using sharp, eclectic forms of comedy and pained human detail to inch Llewyn towards his weary reckoning.

• Hugh Jackman for Prisoners, for hinting at helplessness but displaying pure animalistic veneer in the wake of tragedy, most especially when the plot piles on absurdities, and for providing a smart deconstruction of the Dutiful Avenging Family Man trope and of his own persona.

• Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club, for also boiling down the essential components of who he is as a performer, but showing us what his career has the potential to be, packaging newly rejuvenated charisma, physicality and perceptive character detail into a bonafide star performance.

• Isaiah Washington for Blue Caprice, for a smart adherence to unsettling instability amongst Moors' elliptical construction and unpleasant moods, conveying a man with an odious persecution complex who has a very strong possibility to mold a directionless kid into a dangerous human being.

How appropriate that I publish this list on Father's Day since four of the characters that the actors portray are fathers, though I don't actually remember whether its even mentioned that Ron Woodruff has a daughter or not in Dallas Buyers Club (which he did in real life). I know his paternity wasn't as vital to the story as Isaac's, Jackman's, or Washington's.

Honorable Mentions start with the young Conner Chapman in The Selfish Giant, who's constantly challenged to fluidly fluctuate between being pugnacious and generally caring (sometimes within the same scene), and having to have his entire world come crashing down around him while staying in the naturalistic hew set up by his director; and Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave, who is key to providing the film an understated conduit for empathy and lending nuance to McQueen's hyperbolic style, showing us the ways in which he learns to keep his head down over the years and the utter devastation he exudes with his reluctant involvement in scenes like the whipping scene. These two were fighting tooth and nail for those fourth and fifth slots, but are just as laudable regardless of their unfortunate omission.

Honorable mentions continue with Israel Broussard, who shows sweet elation to his new friends' acceptance and blind desperation to please them in The Bling Ring; Vincent Lindon, who serves as an emptied-out sexual and cerebral embodiment of the mythic, rock-nosed noir hero in Bastards; Joaquin Phoenix, who handles against-type tasks so deftly in Her, like the natural amiability he shows around Amy, the daffiness he lets loose during the first-date scenes between he and Samantha or how measured and revealing he makes scenes like the lunch with his soon-to-be ex-wife; Mads Mikkelson, who  has to work around a jerry-rigged script to provide an honest characterization of a man who's lost everything in the otherwise turgid, The Hunt; Bruce Dern, who does everything in his power to keep Woody from feeling one-note, adding a myriad of colors to his shame, humor, and aloofness amidst Nebraska's cajoling of easy gags and empty ranking of characters; Paul Eenhorn, who imparts This is Martin Bonner's title character with solitary reticence, and who avoids the lazy routine of viewing his religious crutch in a sneering, judgmental eye, painting his observer-reactor with wisdom and lust for life just waiting to shine through; Ali Mosaffa, who manages to make the twisty but faintly revealing nature of The Past's plot and character dynamics compelling, laying out a complicated history with Marie and a rich specificity in those promising opening scenes and warm approachability during the lunch with his stepdaughter; Miles Teller, whose charming turn as a wise-ass but intoxicatingly friendly high-schooler in The Spectacular Now transcends the surface teen alcoholism PSA and finds ways to earn our concerns and sympathies for the track that Sutter is going down; Ethan Hawke, who continues to make Jesse an endearing but slightly insensitive "roosterprick", constantly catching himself with his foot placed firmly in his mouth, even in his later, more weathered years in Before Midnight; and Tom Hanks, who starts off at one level as the cipher-ish titular captain in Captain Phillips and lets the entire film build to some of his most emotionally stripped-down moments than we've ever seen from him in the cathartic release of the film's ending.

Best of 2013: Direction

Best Director

• Clio Barnard for The Selfish Giant, for working from an emotionally wrecking palette of hardscrabbling working-class dynamics and social realism, achieving bold depth of naturalism and narrative velocity, without The Arbor's oppressiveness.

• Ethan Coen & Joel Coen for Inside Llewyn Davis, for conceiving an ill-fated protagonist in a misanthropic hew but veining his hardships with an emotionally tender throughline, subtly invoking dusty, era-specific nostalgia and bruising, ornery cheekiness to do so.

• Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity, for being prodigious in scope, ambition and craft without feeling airless or mechanical in execution or style, achieving a limber braiding of intimacy, empathy and urgency in each of his marvelous sequence constructions.

• Claire Denis for Bastards, for setting up taut, shard-like frames, surfaces and insinuations while balancing sensuous and stoic approaches to confrontational material, and for linking the film's seedy undercurrents and social-political adroitness in ways that serve the story cogently.

• Steve McQueen for 12 Years a Slave, for seeing trickier, more truthful angles of observation in Solomon's story than I suspect Ridley's otherwise good script does, employing his distinctive strengths of elevated style to evoke a devastating ordeal.

Honorable Mentions begin with Joshua Oppenheimer for The Act of Killing, who immediately grabs our attention with the audacity of his conceit and, barring the one little quibble about insufficient context, keeps the novelty of it sobering, head-spinning and world-crushing; Sofia Coppola for The Bling Ring, whose gifts with mood and rhythms feel riskier than they usually and more adventurous when applied to its satirical bent; and Andrew Dosunmu for Mother of George, who manages to distribute cultural and familial unease across a bevy of memorable characters and bracing visual schemes.

The rest of the honorable mentions are filled out by (in alphabetical order): Noah Baumbach for Frances Ha; Xavier Dolan for I Killed My Mother; Spike Jonze for Her; Abbas Kiarostami for Like Someone in Love; Harmony Korrine for Spring Breakers; Terrence Malick for To the Wonder; Alexandre Moors for Blue Caprice; Kim Nguyen for War Witch; Ulrich Seidl for Paradise: Love

Best of 2013: Cinematography

The last of the technical categories! Only four more categories to go until we can put this year behind us.

Best Cinematography

• Emanuel Lubezki for Gravity, for taking this technology to bolder and more excitingly resourceful places than his effects-driven predecessors in the Oscar-equivalent category ever have, finding a rich distillation of light, space, lensing and action-specific mobility all within its green-screen confines.

• Bruno Delbonnel for Inside Llewyn Davis, for devising a frigid yet crystalline palette that serves key themes, settings and moods while demonstrating a remarkable sensitivity to faces and silhouettes, and for bouncing so deceptively off of the Coens' visual conceptions.

• Bradford Young for Mother of George, because beyond the fact that he's one of the few DPs working who can favorably light darker-complected actors, he's also tremendously adept at enriching emotions, tones and dramatic textures, finding vivid and engrossing observational angles to set the scene with.

• Benoit Debie for Spring Breakers, for integrating a hypnotic gallery of mobile lensing and neon, sun-kissed and sterile sources of light to relay a mystical yet deftly investigative glance into the spring break ethos, if only for its first 40-50 minutes alone.

• Emanuel Lubezki for To the Wonder, for sustaining Malick's familiar kinship with capturing crunchy, gold-leafed landscapes and ecstatic angles of natural light and allowing both to serve as a microcosm for the film's living and dying relationship at its core.

Honorable Mentions were tough to boil down in such a strong year, but I hated having to exclude the fabulous streetlight gleam of Bastards; the dreamy excess of The Bling Ring; the unflinching detail of 12 Years a Slave's camera; even more gliding beatification from Bradford Young with Ain't Them Bodies Saints; and the awe-inspiring mechanics behind

Leviathan's almost-literally-down-in-the-gears visual sculpting. These five would have made a worthy lineup all on their own, so consider them my extreme honorable mentions.

From a cinemtography perspective, I also liked (in alphabetical order): All is Lost, The Grandmaster, Her, Only God Forgives, Post Tenebras Lux, Prisoners, and The Selfish Giant. And no, I was not impressed by Nebraska's cinematography.

Best of 2013: Supporting Actress

Best Supporting Actress

• Amy Adams for Her, for eliciting the film's most generous and delicate gaze through which we view Theodore, assembling a sharp economy of warmth, sensitivity, communication and frustration and never once allowing any of these facets to box Amy in as the obvious alternative to Samantha.

• Scarlett Johansson for Don Jon, for infusing full-flavored enthusiasm and lived-in personality into a regressive caricature, embracing her voice and voluptuous body language to embody a real person with real flaws/strengths and to engage with comedic and dramatic beats in significant ways.

• Lupita Nyong'o for 12 Years a Slave, for refurbishing the script's propensity for takes on character types with a distillation of angular forms of speech, amplified physicality, and an honest approach to a sympathetic character all of which make the idea of this girl a more potent concept than it is on paper.

• Léa Seydoux for Blue is the Warmest Color, for candidly suggesting what it is about Emma that attracts Adele's voracious gaze, hewing to a chewy, cerebral concept of her sexuality, and for the strands of composure, aggression, and desire that manifest in the break-up and post-break-up scenes.

• Emma Watson for The Bling Ring, for deceptively integrating Nikki into the middleground of the group and narrative curves and staying true to such a scabrous and tetchy satirical portrait when navigating a wide range of panic, petulance and repentance, slyly allowing all to play in her favor.

Honorable Mentions: These five ladies are so terrific (and if I'm being honest, were also the five nominees that I had the easiest time settling on) that I didn't even feel as bad as I usually do about leaving smaller, less high-regarded performers/performances out of the shortlist that would nevertheless make fine nominees on their own, like Ela Piplits in Museum Hours, who enters about halfway through the film for one guest lecture on Brueghel, flirting with deliberate didacticism while fully submerging herself as just one fascinating component of a bigger portrait; Julie Bataille in Bastards, who balances frazzled, petty and abrasive reactions to traumatizing news and piles even more layers to them when we find out information that only she was privy to; Sarah Paulson in 12 Years a Slave, who utilizes razor-sharp actorly instincts in vivifying this unnerving portrait of a slave-master's wife who turns out to be just as vicious as her husband; Angela McEwan in Nebraska, who sweeps in at just the right moment when the film is beginning to feel flabby and provides its most poignant and fully felt grace notes as Woody's former fling; and Mickey Sumner for Frances Ha, who is tasked with making Sophie the spitting spiritual image of the titular character (only with different hair) and then her foil, while managing to kindle a whole off-screen history behind their friendship.

Further honorable mentions are rounded out by Alfre Woodard in 12 Years a Slave; Verena Lehbauer in Paradise: Hope; Nadezhda Markina in In the Fog; Kristin Scott Thomas in Only God Forgives; Maggie Siff in Concussion; Suzanne Clement in I Killed My Mother; and Rebecca Jenkins in Stories We Tell.

Best of 2013: Costumes

Look at me being really close to finishing a project. And in such semi-consistent doses, too!

Best Costume Design

• Michael Wilkinson for American Hustle, for the too-many-to-count miracle-numbers worked on Adams, alone, as well as the constant button rearranging on Cooper's part-detective, part-disco hothead; nearly everyone looks like they're playing a role in the best way possible.

• Suzy Benzinger for Blue Jasmine, for her distinguished efforts in distilling the looks of wealthy New York socialites and California bohemians and making both familiar Allen tropes seem less generic and built more from a character than they have since Bullets Over Broadway.

• Stacey Battat for The Bling Ring, for terrifically rendered and appropriate choices for the characters as well as its easy-target satire, finding model-shoot-ready garments for both the celebrities' stolen fashion items and the "normal" clothes. Bonus points for the courtroom apparel.

• Francois Barbeau & Xavier Dolan for Laurence Anyways, for warmly suggesting real emotions, real complications, and real people beneath the (gorgeously designed) period-specific affectation, even though I wish a little more effort had gone into Laurence's overall look.

• Mabolaji Dawodu for Mother of George, for playing into the film's visual motifs so beautifully and preserving the tonal reticence from which its observations emerge, adding just as many richly arranged textures to its characters as its exquisite cinematography does.

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order): 12 Years a Slave, Behind the Candelabra, Blancanieves, Fill the Void, The Grandmaster, The Great Gatsby, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Lovelace, No

Missed: The Invisible Woman. *sniffle* Another great letdown of 2013 is that I never saw Oprah's track suit in Lee Daniels' The Butler.

Best of 2013: Ensemble Cast

Best Ensemble Cast

• Bale, Adams, Cooper, Lawrence, Renner, C.K., Rohm, et. al. for American Hustle, for capitalizing on sizably showy parts and Russell's stirring of star personas (even Lawrence benefits even though she looks out of place in that role), gaining momentum with the amount of actors on screen.

• Broussard, Chang, Watson, Farmiga, Julien, Mann, et. al. for The Bling Ring, for carving distinct personalities and quiet textures, even those who only have a handful of scenes to do so, nailing the tricky temperament of its central high-schoolers while spryly playing off of one another.

• Gerwig, Sumner, Esper, Driver, Gummer, d'Amboise, et. al. for Frances Ha, for successfully etching a world outside of Frances's own navel-gazing through a conduit of various lively comic personas, all so crucial in telegraphing important character detail and sustaining its bitter humor.

• Metzger, Jasper, Purnell, Solano, Bumb, McDonald, et. al. for I Want Your Love, for stimulating the kind of casual sensitivity to camaraderie and romantic bonds that can only come from a troupe of unprofessional but incisive actors, landing subtle variations on the ways that friends/lovers interact.

• Bernal, Castro, Gnecco, Zegers, Montero, Vadell, et. al. for No, for earnestly selling the film's wavering tone of winking, tongue-in-cheek humor and urgent historical testimony, and for evoking the tangible hazards of pulling off this kind of project under Pinochet's rule.

Honorable Mentions (Alphabetic Order): Behind the Candelabra, Computer Chess, Fill the Void, A Hijacking, In the Fog, Mother of George, Paradise: Love, Prisoners, Something in the Air, The Spectacular Now

Hey, What About:  12 Years a Slave? Solid work from many key players, but not enough interplay with background characters if you ask me; August: Osage County? It's right with my disappointment that a sizable number of its terrific cast couldn't match Streep, Roberts, Cooper, Nicholson, or Shepard, resulting in the occasional out-of-synch sequence. Dallas Buyers Club? Which managed a SAG nomination with a script that neglects anyone that isn't Ron, Rayon or Eve, leaving its recognition there a little puzzling to me since it gives its side players so little to do as a result. Lee Daniels' The Butler? I unfortunately missed it, the combination of a busy semester, faltering Oscar buzz, and worrisome reactions ending in me failing to ever catch up with it. Which is sad, since I kind of loved The Paperboy (it probably would've been a contender for this category if I had ever gotten around to it last year).

Best of 2013: Sets

Best Art Direction/Production Design

• Adam Stockhausen, Alice Baker, et. al. for 12 Years a Slave, for finding perfect objects to strike McQueen's fascination with wrenching as much story detail and atmosphere out of a scene, like the makeshift pencil/ink or the gears of the boat, and for evoking the dramatic backdrop of the plantation.

• Andy Nicholson, Rosie Goodwin, Joanne Woollard, et. al. for Gravity, because every element of its story, barring the terrifically chaotic clouds of debris, is right there in its minimalist yet sweepingly interactive set; keeping us in constant stress over what will or won't work in Ryan's favor.

• K.K. Barrett, Gene Serdena, et. al. for Her, for avoiding the temptation to overtly futurize cityscapes, instead filling them with bold, primary colors, staying in tune with Jonze's airy atmosphere while composing a completely plausible evolution of technology.

• Unccredited for Museum Hours, for utilizing so many pre-existing locations that an art direction credit would feel redundant, allowing the museum's paintings and sculptures to pass back and forth between the still life depictions of city and character, existing within and mirroring one another.

• Jack Fisk, Jeanette Scott, et. al. for To the Wonder, for keying up Malick's relationship with nature and linking it to the film's contrasting of the pastoral romantic rapture of France and alluring but antiseptic Americana, and for the purely expressionistic but plausible details of the house.

Extreme Honorable Mentions begin with two animated films, the first being The Wind Rises, which earnestly evokes the dangers of its setting and injects it with the same bouts of whimsy we've come to expect from Miyazaki, and the second is the more flat-out fanciful, Ernest and Celestine, which does like to show off just a bit, but emerges with such genuine and loving ardor with its clever world-building. Speaking of show-offy, Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways starts at 11 with its production values and never quite dials it down during its nearly three-hour running time, from the disco to the house inhabited by the family of drag queens to the cloudbursts of clothing, each frameable image is a keeper, and Behind the Candelabra also gets a glamorous (albeit much more shimmery) treatment to its sets, but in ways that emit the nuance of the story and central romance, beautifully.

Further honorable mentions go to The Selfish Giant, for painting such a stirring, Kes-like portrait of an impoverished milieu; The Bling Ring, for going in a completely opposite direction and showing us a world outfitted by excessive shrines to people's own successes; The Great Beauty, for managing to at least thrill visually where its script doesn't, going all-in on the ridiculous constitutions of Art that its protagonist would be irritated by, even if  I wish the movie as a whole felt less cowed by the familiar techniques that they connote; Only God Forgives, for being unabashed formalistic erotica, even if merely acknowledging it makes me sick to my stomach (which, I'm sure, is exactly what Refn intended); Antiviral, for that amazing billboard of Hannah Geist, and its acerbic construction of a dystopian universe; Mother of George, for using the city, the apartments, and the places of worship to evoke a specific mood and psychology of its characters; and Saving Mr. Banks, for the complimentary Pooh Bear, and for other fun Disney-related product placements nods.