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.