My Awards nominations: Supporting Actress

Not the strongest year, in my opinion. These Supporting Actress performances are good, but none of them truly stands out to me as an obvious winner. I'm actually interested to find out which one I'll decide upon!

JESSICA CHASTAIN in The Help:

I could just as easily slotted her down for her graceful work on The Tree of Life, but she had more to chew on here; her character bubbles with infectious eccentricity to suppress her messy and complicated feelings of grief and shame.

ELLE FANNING in Super 8:

For being in a second-rate monster movie, she is surprisingly memorable. Her puppy love affair with Joe ratchets up the cute factor, and her rehearsal scene for the movie-within-a-movie seems to be the unanimous highlight of the film.

BRYCE DALLAS HOWARD in The Help:

She takes up the thankless task of playing the waspish queen bee of Jackson's privileged elite, an easy-to-hate but tricky-to-perform character in whom can be detected a frighteningly human element. Her final scene = perfection.

MELANIE LAURENT in Beginners:

Laurent is softly radiant as the love interest in this melancholy romance. You can't help but smile at her light comic touch, nor can you help but sigh at the fragility of her tender heart. Exquisitely supports the tone of the film.

CAREY MULLIGAN in Shame:

Mulligan shows us her range with a spikier, worldlier character than the naïve nymph that first brought her to our attention in An Education. She exceptionally plays the clingy, complex relationship with her sex-addicted brother.

Just missed:
Jessica Chastain in The Tree of Life, Evan Rachel Wood The Ides of March,
Shailene Woodley in The Descendants, Cate Blanchett in Hanna,
Vanessa Redgrave in Coriolanus

Review - Beginners

Beginners, Mike Mills' gentle little drama about the generation-spanning challenge of finding happiness, succeeds in great part due to its three central performances and Mills' thoughtful screenplay. Ewan McGregor plays a lonely graphic artist still quietly reeling from a death in the family; his father, excellently played by Christopher Plummer, was 75 years old when he came out about his homosexuality and proceeded to try and grab once last slice of happiness before his terminal lung cancer took over. This story is told in flashback while we follow McGregor's pursuit of a relationship after his father's death. Having met an eccentric woman at a party, the softly radiant Melanie Laurent, he revels in his new found love, but his private insecurities about the finite nature of happiness threaten to sabotage the burgeoning romance. Mills' script and direction are beautifully restrained, employing a melancholy sense of humour when needed to lighten his film's understated but deep-running sadness.

***1/2 out ****