I can’t tell if it means something or not that nine of my Top Ten are women. It certainly feels like 2018 was a banner year for roles for women in movies, though The Favourite and If Beale Street take up four of those slots. I thought it would be cool if the entire Top Ten was women, but Ethan Hawke forced his way in, which speaks to how undeniable that performance was.
Notable absences:
Willem Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate: Haven’t seen it.
Anybody from Green Book: Still haven’t seen it! Think I should?
Anybody from Vice: They were fine.
Glenn Close, The Wife: Haven’t seen it.
Anyway, here were my favorite twenty contenders from last year:
Top Twenty
20. Michael B. Jordan, Black Panther: Jordan has been a great actor since his days as Wallace on The Wire, but his best roles have all come in movies directed by Ryan Coogler. His most soulful roles have probably been in the Creed movies, but his villain in Black Panther gave him a chance to demonstrate his complexity. Killmonger balanced two worlds in one man, representing the anger resulting from colonization as perfectly as T’Challa represents what should have been.
19. Kathryn Hahn, Private Life: Hahn was mired for so long in her career in terrible comedies and middling TV shows that it’s refreshing to see her put her craft to use in something as substantial as Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life. Hahn plays a writer hoping to become a mother as she and her husband (Paul Giamatti) struggle to conceive. She’s wonderful in her vulnerability.
18. Brian Tyree Henry, If Beale Street Could Talk: His scene only last 12 minutes, but Henry’s impact on If Beale Street is indelible. He appears as an old friend of Fonny’s (Stephan James) and falls into telling him what it was like in prison. The darkness in Henry’s eyes as he tells his story falls over the entire movie and colors everything that happens afterward in a different shade.
17. Elizabeth Debicki, Widows: All the women in Widows lose their husbands, and the movie does a brilliant job of making it unclear whether or not that’s a wholly bad thing for any of them, but especially for Debicki’s Alice, whose husband (Jon Bernthal) abused her before his death. Debicki appears lower down on this list in The Tale, where she plays a very self-assured woman who is just a terrible person. In Widows, Debicki is the lease self-assured character in the movie, and the journey she goes on over the course of the story is essential to the movie’s themes.
16. Brady Jandreau, The Rider: Amateur actors have supplied some of the great performances in film history, perhaps because the medium requires individual moments to be captured rather than a sustained performance like on the stage. Whatever the reason, Jandreau, whose life forms the basis for The Rider‘s story, breaks out in this beautiful movie. His naturalism is a plus for such a naturalistic film, but his compassion shines through more than anything.
15. Steven Yeun, Burning: Yeun has a very punchable face in Burning. I mean that as a testament to his acting ability, I promise, because in interviews he is very likeable. His cocky character in Burning, who may or may not be a murderer but is most definitely a jackass, also captures your attention in every scene as Yeun imbues him with both charisma and a hint of authenticity. He seems like the kind of guy you’d hate until you talked to him one on one and he shared just enough vulnerability to make you doubt that he’s a jerk- but really he’s just a jerk.
14. Natalie Portman, Annihilation: At this point you know Annihilation is my favorite movie of the year, and Portman is a huge reason why. She has always occupied an interesting space in the movies as someone who is clearly a movie star but has no interest in following any sort of expected path for her career. Portman fascinates me in Annihilation, because she epitomizes that in-between space. She begins the movie as one thing, a principled doctor, and by the end of the movie both she and the audience discover she is something else entirely.
13. Bradley Cooper, A Star Is Born: The memes probably killed Cooper’s chances at any of the big Oscars. It’s a shame, because while this isn’t Cooper’s best performance ever, it’s still a remarkable transformation. Jackson Maine’s and Ally’s love story is not believable, except that Cooper and Gaga make it believable. Cooper’s greatness was already established, but A Star Is Born should solidify that he belongs up there among the best actors of his generation.
12. Hugh Grant, Paddington 2: Paddington 2 is an astoundingly good movie. There is very little space between it at No. 3 on my list and Annihilation at No. 1. But the movie is nothing without Hugh Grant’s villain, and believe me when I hyperbolize here: Grant is an absolute revelation. He chews the scenery, yes, but after a while you realize that Hugh Grant is the scenery.
11. Emma Stone, The Favourite: It’s impossible to choose between the three actresses in The Favourite. A ranking system like this forces me to, but the truth is that Stone, Rachel Weisz, and Olivia Colman are equals, and their ranking here is related more to the meatiness of their respective roles than their talent level. Stone is given a lot more physical comedy in The Favourite than the other two and slightly less nuance in her character development. But No. 11 in all the performances I saw last year is nothing to sneeze at.
10. Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk: King has been such a solid workhorse performer in mediocre material for much of her career, so it was a genuine pleasure to watch her run away with awards season, culminating in a moving win of last year’s Oscar for Actress in a Supporting Role. She was the only member of the Beale Street cast to be recognized throughout awards season. It makes some sense, since she has the showiest role in the movie. In one scene she travels all the way to Puerto Rico to plead for help from a stranger to help her save her daughter’s boyfriend from jail time. In another, in one of the movie’s core scenes of morality, King appeals to another mother’s sense of parental love to outweigh her misplaced piety.
9. Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade: I don’t remember middle school very fondly. Eighth Grade makes the case that things have just gotten worse for today’s preteens. Fisher plays an awkward, insecure eighth grader- that is to say, she plays an eighth grader. Director Bo Burnham and Fisher understand something most teen movies don’t get about teens today, that the teenage affect is performative. You have to get under the front that teenagers present to the world, especially in light of social media. Fisher finds both the face and the facade.
8. Rachel Weisz, The Favourite: Emma Stone is a physical force in The Favourite, using her body in space for comedy in brilliant ways. Weisz, by contrast, is a coiled spring. Of the three main actors in this movie, Weisz’s character is the most in control. Even when she appears to be losing, she has the upper hand, and Weisz is a tension wire throughout. But like Stone, she too has an unexpected character arc, and the way Weisz changes her tension by the end of the movie is astounding.
7. Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born: There’s something to be said for beginner’s luck. Gaga had appeared in projects before this (most notably American Horror Story), but nothing had really prepared audiences for how good she would be as the up-and-coming star, Ally, in A Star Is Born. It helps that Ally is basically Gaga herself from ten years ago, an artist struggling against the norms of her field to achieve her dream against the odds. You don’t have to buy into Gaga herself and what she’s been selling for the past decade to appreciate the level of talent she brings to this role. It’s tempting to comment on the rawness of her performance and assume that she’s not even really performing, but she’s better than that.
6. Laura Dern, The Tale: The nature of the story that The Tale tells means that much of Laura Dern’s performance is passive. The Tale consists of Dern discovering that many of her memories of her childhood have been faulty, her mind faltering in her memories of trauma. Because of this, most of what we see of Dern is her parsing through the events surrounding two adults in her life. The movie largely follows her character’s childhood self. But the moments in which Dern takes action to discover the truth and to confront her abusers are devastating.
5. KiKi Layne, If Beale Street Could Talk: Beale Street suffered in the Oscar race from a late release date and a subpar advertising campaign. It’s the kind of movie that we’re going to be looking back on in ten years, marveling at the lack of awards it received. But no one came out of its awards season push looking more underserved than Kiki Layne. She is the heart of this movie – or, rather, her character’s love for Fonny (Stephan James) is the heart of this movie, and she sells that love so well. Layne sells it well at he beginning of the movie when they are first discovering each other. And she sells it well at the end, when she must show her inner strength as they fight to maintain their love while Fonny is in prison.
4. Olivia Colman, The Favourite: Of the three main performers in The Favourite, Colman has by far the hardest job. She is playing a character who is quite literally disturbed, but who has complete agency as the queen. When we first meet Queen Anne, she is set in her ways, obeying her lover, Sarah Churchill (Weisz), in matters of state. The introduction of Sarah’s cousin, Abigail (Stone), into court awakens something inside Anne. This manifests as greater energy, which is originally a good thing. But Colman imbues Anne with a bitterness that devolves into mania by the end of the film, and Colman finds the humanity in that inanity.
3. Ethan Hawke, First Reformed: Some of the greatest hymns find their resting place in sorrow and despair. To me, Ethan Hawke’s performance is like those hymns: he finds the reality of hopelessness but grounds it in the things of God. That is to say, the depths that Hawke sinks to as Rev. Toller are real. But God meets us in that real place, and Hawke illustrates this in moments of pure transcendence. He’s helped along by some fantastical filmmaking from director Schrader. But the power in First Reformed rests firmly in how Hawke bridges the great divide that mirrors the one in all of our souls.
2. Sakura Andô, Shoplifters: The films of Hirokazu Koreeda that have broken out in America have largely been quiet affairs. Shoplifters is different, and Sakura Andô is a big reason why. Koreeda films have had great actresses before; Kirin Kiki has been a mainstay in his movies as the grandmother character, and both Still Walking and After the Storm have strong female foils for their male protagonists. But the story Shoplifters tells, while sharing the screen evenly between Andô’s character and that of her male co-star (Lily Franky), finds most of its emotional resonance in Sakura Andô’s world-weary mother figure. Andô manages to strike a balance between jaded and wishful when her character’s family happens upon a mostly abandoned child and takes her in. When her family’s misdeeds finally catch up with them, its her reaction that sets the moral tone of the movie, and it’s unforgettable.
1. Joanna Kulig, Cold War: I’m not sure a sadder performance has ever been put on film. Hyperbole is necessary to describe Kulig’s performance, because it encompasses such a wide range of emotions. There are scenes in Cold War where Kulig’s musicality and spark remind you that a free life is worth living to the fullest. And then there are scenes in which her character, Zula, finds nothing worth living for under communist repression. Her co-star, Tomasz Kot, is also terrific, but its Kulig’s fire that lights up the film, even though it eventually burns the whole thing down. I don’t agree with where the two characters end up taking themselves, but because of Kulig’s performance, I never stopped believe their choices were anything less than legitimate.
Another Thirty Contenders (alphabetical by last name)
Yalitza Aparicio, Roma
Emily Blunt, Mary Poppins Returns
Emily Blunt, A Quiet Place
Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther
Noah Centineo, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Toni Collette, Hereditary
Lana Condor, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Viola Davis, Widows
Marina de Tavira, Roma
Elizabeth Debicki, The Tale
Adam Driver, BlacKkKlansman
Sam Elliott, A Star Is Born
Lily Franky, Shoplifters
Ryan Gosling, First Man
Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Armie Hammer, Sorry to Bother You
Laura Harrier, BlacKkKlansman
Michael B. Jordan, Creed II
Jong-seo Jun, Burning
Zoe Kazan, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Kirin Kiki, Shoplifters
Tomasz Kot, Cold War
Blake Lively, A Simple Favor
Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here
Jason Ritter, The Tale
Lakeith Stanfield, Sorry to Bother You
John David Washington, BlacKkKlansman
Michelle Yeoh, Crazy Rich Asians
Past Top Tens
Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
Timothée Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name
Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
James McAvoy, Split
Meryl Streep, The Post
Nicole Kidman, The Beguiled
Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
Zoe Kazan, The Big Sick
Colin Farrell, The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Robert Pattinson, Good Time
Natalie Portman, Jackie
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Amy Adams, Arrival
Colin Farrell, The Lobster
Sasha Lane, American Honey
Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea
Emma Stone, La La Land
Andrew Garfield, Silence
Anya Taylor-Joy, The Witch
Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Michael B. Jordan, Creed
Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina
Idris Elba, Beasts of No Nation
Juliette Binoche, Clouds of Sils Maria
Tom Hardy, The Revenant
Nina Hoss, Phoenix
Teyonah Parris, Chi-Raq
Brie Larson, Room
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Maika Monroe, It Follows
Michael Keaton, Birdman
Edward Norton, Birdman
Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin
Agata Trzebuchowska, Ida
J.K. Simmons, Whiplash
Emma Stone, Birdman
David Oyelowo, Selma
Bradley Cooper, American Sniper
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Beyond the Lights
Julie Delpy, Before Midnight
Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Great Gatsby
Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips
Brie Larson, Short Term 12
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight
Jake Gyllenhaal, Prisoners
Coulda Been a Contender 
