My Award nominations: Supporting Actor

No clear frontrunner for me in this category this year. I'm not yet sure which of these five Supporting Actors I'll choose as the year's best:

Review - The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The unbearably long gap between the November Oscar releases and the Christmas Oscar releases has driven me all the back to last September in the hunt for something decent to watch. My quarry: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Based on his own novel of the same name, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower may appear to be nothing more than a fairly typical high school movie, and the reason for that appearance is because... well, it is. But just because something isn't remarkable or revelatory, that doesn't mean it can't still move and captivate. This particular youth-oriented drama is a graceful montage of a year-in-the-life, steeped in all the agony and ecstasy that one year can bring, but told with the utmost tenderness.

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 - We Need to Talk About Kevin

They say there's no greater grief than that of a mother who loses her child, but what about that of a mother who is hated by her child? In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay uses bold cinematic strokes to immerse us in the guilt, anguish, and confusion of a woman whose son holds an inexplicable personal vendetta against her, leading up to an atrocity that shatters more than just her life.

Tilda Swinton plays Eva, a practically catatonic woman struggling to lead a normal life in the wake of a hinted-at tragedy that left her without her family and reviled by her community. Through her daily drudgery she comes across sights and sounds that trigger memories that inform us about how she came to her current pitiable station. At first, the recollections are a vague but vivid wash of colour and sound; deep reds cascade across the screen while sirens and lawn sprinklers bleed in and out of the soundtrack.