My Award Nominations: Best Supporting Actress

Unlike their male counterparts over in Best Supporting Actor, the five actresses chosen for my own personal ballot had a lot of competition to rise above in order to secure this nomination, and even as I write this they're not that secure. Ask me again tomorrow and I may have three or four new names surfacing as my favourites. That's because there's been a deep well from which to draw this year. So much so, that overlap between me and the Academy has been limited to a single performance (which is obviously going to win that Oscar, so you won't hear me complaining).

Check out my Best Supporting Actress contenders for 2014:

Review - Nightcrawler

Just a quick take on this one, before the deluge of prestige biopics and foregone Oscar nominees start creeping their ways into theatres. Speaking of creeping, Jake Gyllenhaal does his fair share of it in this slick thriller, in which he plays a ghastly parody of the self-made man.

Louis Bloom is a tenacious young go-getter who accurately pitches himself to prospective employers as a fast learner who's willing to do whatever it takes to get a job done and done well. Yet even the most positive corporate attitude isn't worth the paper it's printed on if nobody's hiring.

Ever the entrepreneur, Lou tries his hand at the nocturnal profession of nightcrawling, an ethically borderline job that has him tracking down violent crime stories and shooting video for the highest bidding news network. If Lou is one thing, he's driven.