My Awards nominations: Supporting Actor

Supporting Actor:

ALBERT BROOKS in Drive:

Brooks finds the seedy darkness inside an outwardly affable facade that makes his villainous mob boss all the more threatening.

ROBERT FORSTER in The Descendents:

Even though he only appears in a couple of scenes, the impact he leaves is palpable. The only way he knows how to cope with the grief of his daughter's inevitable death is bitterness and anger, but we can sense his love and his hurt.

EZRA MILLER in We Need to Talk About Kevin:

We don't get much exposure to Miller (as the older Kevin) until halfway through the movie, but once he's there he carries a ubiquitous presence that you can't shake. His depiction of a disturbed youth is as unsettling as they come.

BRAD PITT in The Tree of Life:

With a galvanic performance that bests any other of his career, Pitt becomes the personified embodiment of Mallick's idea of Nature; raw, unrelenting, pure, instinctive. It's hard to play an abstract theme instead of an arc, but Pitt nails it.

CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER in Beginners:

Plummer's warm portrayal of dying man finally finding his identity in his last year of life is as inspiring as it is sad; a masterful stroke that blends the joy of his character's sexual liberation with the sorrow of knowing his own mortality.

Just missed:
Hugo Weaving in Captain America, Ben Kinsgley in Hugo, Nick Nolte in Warrior,
Patton Oswalt in Young Adult

Review - The Descendents

The Descendants, Alexander Payne's eagerly anticipated followup to Sideways, tells a sad, drawn out tale of grief and growth with a mellow Hawaiian flavour.

George Clooney plays Matt King, a landowner from Oahu whose wife is in a terminal coma following a boating accident. With his two daughters Alex and Scotty (Shailene Woodely and Amara Miller) struggling to cope in their own unique ways, and with a pending business transaction that would make Matt and his extended family very wealthy at a moral cost, the stress has already reached a smothering level. The discovery that his wife was cheating on him with a slick realtor is only the grain of salt that tips Matt's scale in the direction of (for once in life) taking action, setting him a personal mission to confront his wife's lover in the hopes of finding some kind of closure – or maybe something else entirely.