I Got Your Ballot. Right Here...

Best Ensemble Performance of the Year - The Kids are All Right
Five of these performers are mentioned below.

The nominees for the 83rd Annual Academy Awards have been announced. A full list of them can be found here. I'll comment more on them as the Oscars draw nearer. For now, just for fun. Here's what my ballot would have looked like for the six major categories (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress).

The Best Films of 2010: or The Year of the Woman

Could it be that the movies have finally figured out how to tell stories with fully realized female leads? Hollywood has a long and embarrassing history of portraying women either as cardboard cutouts or as completely disposable characters altogether, leaving the interesting personalities, heroics, and complications to male characters. But this year saw two lesbian mothers (Annette Benning and Julianne Moore in Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids are Alright") raise their two children and respond to life's obstacles with wit and wisdom and gravitas and without the help of men. A paranoid schizophrenic ballerina dancer (Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan"), in obsessive pursuit of the perfect performance, embodies all of the pains and trials and sacrifices of art, regardless of gender. 


A young girl in the Ozarks (Jennifer Lawrence in Debra Granik's "Winter's Bone") who, while caring for her two young siblings and vegetable mother, must track down her father, who listed the family's house for collateral on his bail and then no-showed at court. Another young girl (Hailee Steinfeld in Joel and Ethan Coen's "True Grit") sees the way the men of the West do business, and the way business should be done, and offers no compromise between the two. A CIA operative/Russian Spy/who-knows-anymore (Angelina Jolie in Phillip Noyce's "Salt") is allowed to make intelligent decisions provoked by emotion for what must be one of the first times in the history of the action movie. Raised for the sole purpose of donating her organs to those deemed more worthy of them, a young woman (Carrie Mulligan in Mark Romanek's "Never Let Me Go") maintains impossible posture as the love of her short life mistakenly buys into the seductions of an envious mutual friend.


And these are just American films. I could go on about the brilliant leads in Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank" (Katie Jarvis) and Martin Provost's "Seraphine" (Yolande Moreau), and already this year we've seen Isabelle Huppert's heroic performance in Claire Denis' "White Material" (already an early favorite for best of the year). Many of these women characters are weak, but none are shallow, and just as many are stalwart figures in emotional torrents. This shift toward an equal female psychology, and the speed and scope by which it occurred, may prove to make 2010 one of the most encouraging years for movies I've seen in my lifetime.


As it were, it was just a terrific year for movies in general. Here are the top 25 films of 2010, having seen theatrical release dates in the state of Nebraska within the year. (Note: a few of these films made the rounds on critics' lists at the end of 2009, but didn't make it out to the plains until early the next year, which would explain why some of these films may seem to be old news)