Apart from Maggie Gyllenhaal’s bizarre Best Supporting Actress nomination for “Crazy Heart,” critics and entertainment industry experts deemed the 2010 Oscar nominations a rather unsurprising affair. Although the Academy expanded its Best Picture race from five to 10 films, countless performances still missed the ballot. Four in particular rendered 2009 the exceptional year for film that it was.
Best Actor — Michael Stuhlbarg, “A Serious Man” The Best Actor race was perhaps the most predictable category of the year, and with big name Academy favorites like Jeff Bridges, George Clooney and Morgan Freeman in the mix, Stuhlbarg’s comedic yet tragic interpretation of straight-laced college mathematics professor Larry Gopnik’s existential crisis sadly fell off the radar. His wife leaves him, his kids hate him, a student is blackmailing him and his brother is freeloading off him and living on his couch. All in all, Gopnik’s life sucks, but from start to finish, Stuhlbarg carries this bizarre, vaguely surrealistic film on his shoulders. As he loses more and more control over everyone and everything around him, Stuhlbarg’s performance reaches unforeseen emotional rafters.
Best Actress — Kristen Stewart, “Adventureland” These days, Kristen Stewart’s name has become synonymous with softcore vampire pornography, showing up to MTV award shows blazed out of one’s mind and numb, almost catatonic facial expressions. In Greg Mottola’s sweetly nostalgic 1980s summertime romance “Adventureland,” Stewart co-starred as Em, a doe-eyed, mysterious townie and delivered a performance as alluring and haunting as the after-hours affair she engaged in during the film. Stewart brought subtle grace to Em, whose troubled emotional baggage is as heavy as a summer night’s humidity. Self-loathing and borderline masochistic, Em is the archetypal kind of character that begs to be overacted with plate smashing and melodramatic screaming. Instead, Stewart lets her saucer eyes do the talking and the emotional effect is deafening. Let’s just hope Ms. Stewart starts directing those saucer eyes toward more scripts like “Adventureland” and away from anything involving sex with supernatural creatures.
Best Supporting Actor — Zach Galifianakis, “The Hangover” As the delightfully offbeat Alan (who’s not allowed to be within two hundred feet of a school or a Chuck E. Cheese), Zach Galifianakis delivers the comedic performance of the year. Although “The Hangover” suffered from several contrived plot devices, Galifianakis’ performance managed to make me consistently laugh as hard as I do whenever Werner Herzog talks about animal existentialism. Half perverted creep, a dash of otherworldly alien and part man-child, Alan is something of an anomaly in screwball comedy: thoroughly original. I want to be a part of his wolf pack.
Best Supporting Actress — Julianne Moore, “A Single Man” As boozed-up, English divorcee Charley, an unemployed woman of wealth withering away in the hills of Los Angeles amid the Cuban Missile Crisis, Moore turns the melodrama-o-meter up to histrionic proportions. The performance unfolds in two explosive scenes with interspersed, almost painting-like images of Charley in the afternoon, already on her third gin and tonic while she cakes layers upon layers of mascara for no one but the mirror. Fashion guru and first time director Tom Ford presents Charley’s morose, mansion-lounging life in isolating grandeur and Moore floods the quiet, marble halls with the raw vulnerability of an exposed nerve.
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