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.