Best Supporting Actress 2013

Every year, I make lists of who I think is the Best Lead Actor and Actress and Supporting Actor and Actress, as well as Best Films. This year, I almost skipped Best Supporting Actress. While my Best Supporting Actor list is overflowing, I was pretty unimpressed with my choices for Supporting Actress. A lot of the actresses getting Oscar buzz have failed to really shine to me. Sure, Oprah was fine in The Butler, but best supporting actress? No. We all know how I feel about Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle by now (and it ain't good, ya'll). And I remember really liking Melonie Diaz in Fruitvale Station and Sally Hawkins in Blue Jasmine, but for the life of me, I have no idea why now. So, this is not the best list I have ever come up with in this category. But it's the best I could do in a pretty disappointing year for supporting women.

05. Scarlett Johansson in Don Jon - I have yet to see her voice only work in Her (this weekend!!) which everyone is praising, but if she is as good as she was in Don Jon, then this has been a very good year for Johansson. I've always liked Scarlett, although I never thought she quite lived up to the potential she showed in early films like Ghost World and Lost in Translation. The closest she's come to being great is when she briefly became Woody Allen's muse. But, I was thoroughly impressed with her work as a sexy, bratty Jersey Girl in Don Jon (one of the only things I was impressed with regarding that movie!). Scarlett manages to be sexy and hilarious, using her killer curves and nailing the Jersey Girl vibe without letting her character become a rip off of Snooki. This is the perfect role for her. It allows her to be a sex symbol AND a character actress, all at once.

04. Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street - It's been a good year for pretty blonde girls playing sexy, loud Jersey girls. In Robbie's case, it's a Queens girl, but, like Scarlett, she manages to be sexy while also bringing depth to the only female character that is really distinguishable in a movie about men. She doesn't quite get to Lorraine Bracco from Goodfellas territory, but she also doesn't let this character become a Real Housewife of New Jersey, which it easily could have become. She's got one scene, especially, where she truly let's fly, and it's pretty great. This is truly a star making role for Robbie. Also, bonus points for nailing the accent. Margot Robbie is an Aussie. I never would have guessed.

03. Sarah Paulson in 12 Years a Slave - Paulson isn't getting nearly as much attention as her co-stars, but her performance is every bit as good. As the wife to a mercurial slave plantation owner, Paulson is a quiet, strained, manipulative, tense woman. She keeps her emotions in check, unless its regarding Patsey, the slave who seems to be the apple of her husband's eye. That's when Paulson really lets her anger flare up and it's great to watch a woman who is so controlled hold all of that in check until it slowly boils over. Paulson should be getting much more attention for her sly, subtle performance.

02. Lupita Nyong'o in 12 Years a Slave - Nyong'o plays Patsey, a slave who should be honored to be in the position she's in. As far as slaves go, Patsey is the absolute favorite of her slave owner. In fact, he may actually be in love with her. But while Patsey puts on a brave face, she secretly begs Solomon to end her life. This may be Nyong'o's first professional role, but she's bound to have a long career ahead of her. Her performance is stunning, beautiful and utterly heart breaking.

01. Emma Watson in The Bling Ring - I know what you are probably thinking, that this is a ridiculous choice for Best Supporting Actress of the year. But I stand by my decision, and here's why. Emma Watson absolutely nails it. In a year of so many supporting female performances that didn't impress, or were completely forgettable, Watson's portrayal of a vapid, ditzy, spoiled rich brat is still so vivid in my mind. I never saw any Harry Potter movies. The only experience I had with Watson's acting was The Perks of Being a Wallflower and everyone stole that movie from her. I wasn't fully convinced Watson had any talent, but she absolutely does and she proves it in The Bling Ring. There used to be a reality show on E a few years ago that starred the girl Watson portrays in this movie. I'm not too proud to admit I watched it religiously (what? I love train wreck TV). Watson absolutely becomes this woman, nailing her vocal inflections and pronunciations, her vacant ditzy ways. It's a simply great performance, and one that has definitely stuck with me.

The Bling Ring + Friday Top Five

Ah, the disappointment! If I had made a list earlier this year of the top five movies I was most anticipating this year, The Bling Ring would have been on it (along with The Wolf of Wall Street, Fruitvale Station, The Spectacular Now and The Way Way Back). While the story seems very Lifetime movie worthy (based on the true story of a bunch of L.A. kids who decide to rob the houses of celebrities whose style they admire), with Sofia Coppola behind the camera, it had to be so much more than what it seemed. But I was wrong. The Bling Ring is exactly what it seems. There's no deeper meaning here. Sure, Coppola makes a few very interesting directing choices but for the most part, this is style over substance 101. Plus, for a Coppola movie, this has a very bad script. How many times can you watch a bunch of pretty teenagers break into a house (very easily, I might add) and say things like "Sick" "Hot" and "Oh My God!" The continuous montage of repeating images gets old very quickly. There is a saving grace here though. And that is the performances of Leslie Mann, and especially, ESPECIALLY, Emma Watson, who knocks it out of the damn park. I've never been impressed with her acting before (although I did manage to miss out on that whole Harry Potter craze), but she is so ridiculously good and, also, hilarious in this movie. She's not the star like the media will make you believe. She is supporting, but she steals the entire movie away from everyone else. The movie is almost worth seeing for her performance alone. But everything else is a disappiontment.

Grade: C+

The girls in The Bling Ring behave quite badly: breaking into celeb houses, stealing cars, money, shoes and clothes, snorting obsessive amounts of cocaine. However, if you want five better movies with bad girls, here they are, in this weeks Friday Top Five:

05. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
Quite possibly the epitome of mean girls, especially if you are a high school freshman, Parker Posey's Darla is a class A bitch. She gets her kick torturing younger girls and saying things like "Wipe that face off your head, bitch." Ah, high school!

04. Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004)
Led by a pre-fame Rachel McAdams, the girls in Mean Girls are the meanest of mean girls. They back stab, they gossip, they make burn books about your flaws, the even turn nice girl Cady (Lindsay Lohan before she went cray) into the queen B of mean girls. Plus, they have pretty terrible parent supervision (see: Amy Poehler).

03. Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)
Maybe Thelma and Louise were just misunderstood. They had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and you can argue that everything they did was out of love and female friendship and that they are strong, independent women and we should actually be looking up to them. I would agree. But, they sure do lead the police on a cross country crime spree that culminates with that pitch perfect ending.

02. Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003, 2004)
Uma Thurman's The Bride is just a all around general bad ass. However, she spends the first movie fighting off bad girls Lucy Lui (and, my personal fave Tarantino character, Go-Go), and then she spends the second movie having a knock down, drag out, trailer park brawl with Daryl Hannah, which is glorious and amazing in every sense of the word.

01. Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988)
The epitome of mean girl high school movies, the Heathers are the absolute worst of the worst when it comes to mean girls. But good girl turned homicical maniac (homicide, suicide, what's the difference??) Veronica (80s goddess Winona Ryder) doesn't get off the hook here either. Once she hooks up with J.D. (Christian Slater), her life gets terribly complicated.