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: Screenplays

Best Original Screenplay

• Jean-Pol Fargeau & Claire Denis for Bastards, for slipping into so many cryptically rattled heads while concealing their sawtoothed secrets and motives, ingeniously operating within and testing the formal limits of noir/mystery storytelling mechanics.

• Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig for Frances Ha, for conceiving such a slinky and apropos refusal of a more rigid structure and a specific, tragically funny portrait of one of the most daunting protagonists to come from the often perfunctory American indie trend of late-20s ennui.

• Ethan Coen & Joel Coen for Inside Llewyn Davis, for layering in deliberate steps instead of simply piling on static, misanthropic oddities, supplying sad, ambiguous, tender-hearted, and tragicomic edges to a story haunted by unspoken grief.

• Abbas Kiarostami for Like Someone in Love, for imbuing his knack for mystery, intimacy and elliptical characterization into a delicate and concise polygon of the types of love (and their implications) that constantly shapeshift with the roles that the two protagonists play.

• Darci Piccoult for Mother of George, for adorning a semi-commonplace story with peculiar notes and risky insights into the culture and practices of the family at its core, withholding enough information to keep it from feeling too on the nose.

Honorable Mentions kick off with a trio of scripts that the Academy sprung for, but ultimately brought one too many reservations for me to embrace quite as fully as their cohorts, starting with Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke for Before Midnight (I know some, including the Academy, consider it adapted, but I think it belongs here), who craft some stellar sequences like the hotel argument or the Byzantine-era church conversation that come very close to matching the incisiveness of their predecessors while infusing the glowing personal attachment of the trilogy's protagonists and our own investment in their possibly crumbling relationship. But, especially with return visits, the film as a whole shows its stress marks from the weight of audience expectation, forcing awkward, desperate-to-please exposition and thematic foreshadowing in its first 30 minutes or so, which I think is most evident during the film's choppiest scene in which it actually literalizes these concerns as Jesse is having a very long conversation with his writer friend about the large expectations held in regards to his third novel. We then move to Eric Warren Singer & David O. Russell who present American Hustle as a vertiginous amalgam of Russell's typically bristly showcase of character/actor personalities and loopy, caper-soaked plot tropes that aligns so smoothly with the director's sensibilities that it's easy to dismiss how the script isn't entirely up to the tasks laid out by its modest ambitions, focusing a little too intensely on the con by the last act while letting the initially spiny entanglements of its characters fall slightly to the wayside. But some of the script's most bracing moments are a result of the way it's narrative is sculpted, so it's hard to complain too much. Meanwhile, the script that walked away with the whole thing, Spike Jonze's Her, spins a tale from the director's highest concept yet (give or take Being John Malkovich) and takes a distinct and achingly tender-hearted swerve into an emotionally honest adult parable. My only wish is that it would have taken a somewhat subtler approach to its themes to balance the softness of Jonze's tones, and that it could've been about 15 minutes shorter, but, like Hustle, there's just too much to savor here to fixate on the negatives. With my recent second screening of Hustle fresh in my mind, I still think that I'd be a Her voter, though I find a lot of merits in both. There were admirable aspects in the remaining Original Screenplay nominees (the vivid father-son bonds of Nebraska, the tight past and present weavings of Blue Jasmine, and the impassioned but ambiguous relationship between Ron's rancid politics in Dallas Buyers Club), but others that unfortunately rankle (like Nebraska's flat jokes and reliance on stereotypes, Blue Jasmine's generic and unconvincing conceptions, or Dallas Buyers Club's clunkier emotional devices). While I don't revile any of these scripts, it's still hard for me to accept that all three managed to sneak in over Inside Llewyn Davis (or any of my other favorites, for that matter, not that they actually had a chance).

Taking a significant step away from the movies on Oscar's list we'll now turn our attention to scripts that were nowhere near their radar, like Kim Nguyen's familiarly textured but unexpectedly subversive script for his coming-of-age child-soldier drama, War Witch; Ulrich Seidl & Veronika Franz's best entry into the Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Love, which is relentlessly austere, yes, but is counterbalanced by a richly realized protagonist and surprising swerves into empathy; Jem Cohen's spatially complex and involving world-building of Museum Hours, which balances just the right amount of humor, intellectualism and specificity to keep it on its feet; Travis Matthews' revealing and concise, I Want Your Love, which steadily unfolds the relations and details of its tightly-knit queer community with warmth, laughs and introspection; Xavier Dolan's bravely messy debut script, I Killed My Mother, which somehow manages to be the young filmmaker's crowning achievement of jagged, multilateral perspectives on relationships, whether romantic or familial (haven't seen Tom at the Farm or Mommy as of yet, though, not that the opportunity to do so has arisen in the states); Brandon Cronenberg's (yes, that Cronenberg) vicious and tightly-wound body horror-as-satire, Antiviral, which grows wittier and tougher in its conceptions and plotting the further it goes; and Stacie Passon's modest but candidly detailed character study, Concussion, which can feel contrived and just a smidge judgmental but stokes real compassion and tough-edged convictions.

Best Adapted Screenplay

• John Ridley for 12 Years a Slave, for overriding some overly florid dialogue that, I imagine, feels more awkward actually spoken than it does on the page with powerful construction, historical insight, emotional investment, and subjective POV, treating the subject of slavery with unflinching honesty.

• Sofia Coppola for The Bling Ring, for acclimating her laconic and diaphanous gifts to an acerbic and unusually witty stranger-than-fiction satire, painting characters, loyalties, celebrities, commodities, and chains of events in a deliciously detached fashion.

• Sergei Loznitsa for In the Fog, for imposing a workable, patiently-structured narrative onto the bones of the livid, nonlinear dreamscape of his previous film, still probing his own concerns regarding Russian society and leading us to predatory places no one else would go.

• Pedro Peirano for No, for balancing the tricky trigonometry of political tensions in Pinochet-era Chile and of the allegiances held by its central characters, sliding nimbly between the beats of its Unbelievable True Story conceit without sacrificing context or spirit.

• Clio Barnard for The Selfish Giant, for starting with Oscar Wilde's four-page, allegorical children's fairy tale and erupting into a bustling story of childhood, friendship and social realism, gracing its disparate narrative with thematic parallels that pay crushing emotional dividends.

Honorable Mentions do not include Captain Phillips, Short Term 12, The Wolf of Wall Street, or Phiilomena, all of which inspired their ardent devotees. I like Captain Phillips' script the most, which lends surprising complexity to the Somalians, but gets a hefty amount of assistance from Greengrass's direction and its actors. It was close, but not quite Honorable Mention-worthy. The next two on the other hand had some intriguing moments,  particularly those catered to their leads, but were ultimately too inconsistent to benefit from any of them. The Wolf of Wall Street's script especially feels undone by its director's commitment to ornate but colorless scenarios and by flabby improvisations that abstract any sense of the full-veined characters that many of its fans seemed to find it chock-full of. As previously mentioned, I never saw Philomena.

It wasn't exactly a banner year for this category, but there were a few scripts that I was sad to exclude from the shortlist, like Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck, Shane Morris & Dean Wellins' spiffy and progressive repackaging of Disney formula with Frozen's moving story and convincing characters, retaining the sweetness and beguiling innocence of its kid-friendly core; Abdellatif Kechiche & Ghalia Lacroix's sprawling and multi-layered portrait of Blue is the Warmest Color's protagonist and the relationship explored between she and her beloved; Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber's funny, engaging and sympathetic teen dramedy, The Spectacular Now, which has more interesting things to say about blooming young love and misplaced affection than their (500) Days of Summer script; Richard LaGravenese's smartly proportioned breakdown of Behind the Candelabra's romance of convenience that turns into one of tetchy necessity, landing empathetic tenderness and playful flamboyance even through its appropriately bittersweet final images; and Hayao Miyazaki's unapologetically sentimental adaptation of his own comic, The Wind Rises, which coaxes his typical fondness for odd and lovely flights of visual fancy and fairy tale-ish conceits, but shows him chasing thornier ideas than he has in years.

I gave some thought to showing Tracy Letts some love in the Honorable Mentions, if only for August: Osage County's best moments, like Barbara taking control of the house during the raiding of Violet's drug supplies or the dinner and fish lunch scenes. But, as easy and justifiable as it is to blame John Wells and Weinstein interference (Jesus, that ending) on the overall film being underwhelming, I'm not so sure that Letts's script is doing the film that many favors either, despite a few compelling scenes. As much as Wells fails to deliver on Letts's acrid dramatic spark, the script itself never feels distinctively reformatted for its shift in medium while its best scenes alternate with stale, self-satisfied calculations about its characters, half of which only click as much as they do because of its MVP actors.