Best of 2010 - Supporting Actresses

Best Supporting Performance 2010 – Actress

As hard as it was to pick 5 actresses for Best Actress, it’s even harder to find women in solid supporting roles.  Unfortunately in Hollywood as hard as legit non-rom com leading roles are to find, it’s even harder for supporting roles to actually have any meat to them for women.  That is the reality of Hollywood.  However, occasionally there are times when roles come through in supporting categories that are more than just the girlfriend adding sex appeal, and the doting mother, etc.

Many times it is those roles that can actually stick out the most and the below five females have stuck out very highly in film this year.  Here are my top five supporting actresses for 2010:

5. Julianne Moore – The Kid’s Are All Right – It was tough to pick performances between this film and ‘Chloe’ which I thought her performance was very good.  In the same year Moore played a lesbian wife who had a heterosexual affair and a heterosexual wife who had a lesbian affair.  Interesting year for her, but got good performances out of both.  Moore plays the role in this film very well.  As the ‘motherly’ role in their family Moore is struggling to feel important and as her kids are growing up she feels her role in the family slipping away.  As her partner is also female she can fill both the matriarchal and patriarchal roles which make Moore feel threatened and start searching a sense of purpose which drives her to cheat.  A solid performance all around.

4. Melissa Leo – The Fighter – Leo hits the nail on the head with this role.  Leo’s character has happiness right in front of her with her family and a loving husband; however, she feels that she has been dealt a bad hand and wants nothing more than to find a way out.  The matriarch of this family will do anything she can in order to make sure she gets what she wants.  She hides behind ‘doing what’s best for the family’ while doing only what is best for her, which includes putting her son in danger.  It is Leo’s desperation that is at the soul of this character and what makes the performance so good.

3. Amy Adams – The Fighter – I assure this is in no way influenced by the rather large crush I have on Adams.  Really, I promise.  Her role in this film was a very important one and if she wouldn’t have been able to go toe-to-toe with Leo’s character and Christian Bale’s character then the movie would have been taken down a notch.  Thankfully in Adams case she is talented enough to hang with all of them and even exceed them.  Adams played the tough girlfriend role who had a sweetness and a depth of caring for Mickey Ward that showed through her tough exterior.  It’s difficult to be able to now show emotion while acting but still have it resonate in the performance and her ability to pull that off is what makes her role great and deserving of this list.

2. Helena Bonham Carter – The King’s Speech – With all the buzz around this movie it was this role that was really surprising.  It easily could have slid into the background and been edited into an even smaller bit part but it was the strength of this performance that helped the movie and made it a more prominent role.  Carter was the wife who was bound by royalty and the ways of the royal family yet still stood by her husband and pushed him to be a better man than he already was (which was a pretty good man).  Carter had a very strong performance and one that deserves to be noticed.

1. Blake Lively – The Town – So my ‘get Blake Lively an Oscar Nomination’ campaign failed and she didn’t get nominated, but that doesn’t mean she is any less deserving.  I would say that Affleck’s reputation and her limited screen time contributed to the non-nom, but she had the best performance of the year if you ask me.  Watch her face during the bar scene with Jon Hamm near the end of ‘The Town’ and tell me that wasn’t some of the finest acting you have seen this year.  It was that scene and her scene in the hospital, plus an accent completely nailed that made this performance steal the show whenever she was on screen.  My vote for the best performance of the year in the supporting actress category.