If you're both a movie fan and a consummate statistician, it's easy to love and appreciate the Oscars for shoehorning the majority of film history into a manageable grading rubric. I'm an Oscar apologist myself, and I still have one bone to pick with the Academy -- and all award-spewing organizations: the unnecessary reliance on gender-based categories. Is it not more thrilling to pit all actors against each other? Is there such an objective difference between Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock? Meryl Streep and Robert Downey Jr.? "Actor" is a gender-neutral term, and I think we'd all better off -- and better entertained -- without the meaningless siphoning. Thus, I'm stacking up the best performances of 2011 without categorical regard for gender or role size. It's a winner-take-all affair, and this winner definitely wants it all. Here's my top 10:
10. Albert Brooks, Drive
Albert Brooks is Drive's Oscar-friendliest component, and that's for one reason: eerie, sustained dastardliness. As the Driver's shady foe, Brooks's lovable, aw-shucksy expression hardens into a papier-mache fright. Perhaps he benefits generously from his decision to counteract the lovable schmos he offered in Lost in America and Broadcast News, but his rancor is too real and evil to dismiss. While Ryan Gosling's stoicism helps substantiate Drive's reputation as an evocative mood piece, Brooks's performance steers -- or careens -- the movie into horrifying reality.
9. Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method
Knightley's performance in the part-fascinating, part-boring A Dangerous Method embodies the acting trope "big choices," but it's still a triumph: As Carl Jung's histrionic patient Sabina Spielrein, she's a quivering, questioning, repressed and entirely believable intellectual. Even when she's jutting her jaw in spastic episodes like an unhinged Ruth Buzzi, her humanity is apparent and her insight is breathtaking. For playing such an uncomfortable character, I missed her whenever she wasn't onscreen.
8. Jeremy Irons, Margin Call
Irons's very presence summons actorly gusto, so it's easy to write off his commanding performance (or any of his performances) as a mere extension of his Shakespearean bravado. But Irons is no ham as CEO John Tuld in the bracing ensemble drama Margin Call; he's the perfect picture of bureaucratic spinelessness. If you're wondering what happened to the ungodly chill he once emanated as Claus von Bulow, look for it in his delivery of Margin Call's spookiest insight into Wall Street politics: "If you're first out the door, that's not called panicking."
7. Ralph Fiennes, Coriolanus
Stephanie Zacharek is on to something when she denounces the relatively ho-hum proceedings of Coriolanus's original text, but let's remember to commemorate Ralph Fiennes's directorial debut for its greatest asset: crackling performances. As the titular veteran who wears his moral conflict like an Egyptian death mask, Fiennes's rage transcends mugging, warps into agony, and projects thunderous depth. Thunderous, I say! He's so thoroughly and bleakly numbed to the strife and fanfare he abandons in wartorn "Rome" that his grisly comeuppance in the movie's final moments feels like something of a relief. You see, Fiennes's performance is an internal bloodbath long before we're confronted with a viciously Technicolor one -- and if there's any justice, he'll be rewarded with the Best Actor nomination that he was snubbed for after Quiz Show.
6. Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
The most revered teenage performances seem to share the same dichotomies: childlike overreaction and burgeoning maturity, self-assurance and bubbling insecurity, sensibility and selfishness. Woodley is no iconoclast in these departments, but she gives Alexander Payne's drippy, but poignant The Descendants its handfuls of urgency and momentum. While I'd hate to whittle her fabulous -- and subtle -- work down to one scene, the most memorable sequence I've seen all year is Woodley's underwater breakdown in her family's pool. It's a heartbreaking and startling shot, but moreover, it's an expression of unadulterated fear that confronts the viewer and challenges him to disbelieve her.
5. Christopher Plummer, Beginners
You'd be hard pressed to find a critic who isn't dropkicking Oscar inevitability at Christopher Plummer's touching performance in Beginners, and despite my long history as a contrarian, I'm loving the love: Plummer brings such a grace and joy to his role as Hal, a 75-year-old father who embraces his fully liberated new life as a gay man, that you'd prefer to see a movie only about his world. He approaches both his updated existence and eventual death with a bliss couched in parades and house music, and his relationship with the gorgeous Andy (Goran Visnjic) is both complex and, somehow, transparently real.
4. Michael Fassbender, Shame
Shame's greatest strength is its refusal to rationalize -- or even unpack -- the dour sexual compulsions of its protagonist, Brandon Sullivan. It's meticulously observed, but it's specifically not a cautionary tale. As Brandon, Michael Fassbender explores urban isolation and personal emptiness, a balance we glean within the film's first minute as he saunters through his apartment in the drabbest state of dishabille since, oh, Sissy Spacek's trauma in the Carrie locker room. Fassbender makes Brandon both fascinating and nothing, and the highest compliment I can pay him is that the work is both devastating and unassuming. Brandon exhibits a harrowing self-destructive streak that nearly slips off of you as the credits roll. It's not that the movie isn't raw or powerful enough; you simply believe what you saw.
3. Viola Davis, The Help
As we observe the tightest and gnarliest Best Actress race since -- gosh, the Bette Davis/Gloria Swanson/Judy Holliday matchup of 1950? -- it's impossible to overlook Viola Davis's work in the palatable, Easter-colored The Help. While Glenn Close's comeback turn in Albert Nobbs makes her the Gloria Swanson in this scenario and Meryl Streep's sweeping chutzpah as Margaret Thatcher qualify her to be the metaphorical Bette, Viola Davis is the Oscar-deserving Holliday -- the committed, vulnerable, and starkly intelligent performer who elevates her material and character beyond a saccharine underdog tale. Davis is simply so watchable as the conscientious, unappreciated housekeeper Aibileen Clark that The Help's Disney-esque plot seems to stop, about-face, and stand in attention to her whenever she's given the chance to deliver a monologue to Skeeter (Emma Stone) or confront an odious employer (Bryce Dallas Howard).
2. Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Sad that the Oscar-winning Theron is still fighting for the Best Actress tally's fifth slot when she gives the most nuanced, surprising and exciting lead performance of the year. As the bitterly delusional, deeply under-matured ghostwriter Mavis Gary, Theron showcases quite a range for remaining so monotone and callous; she's a dizzy alcoholic with a pristine self-beautification regimen, a self-consciously successful urbanite who condescends to her small-town roots, and a nightmarishly entitled and oblivious woman-child. Much has been said about the unsympathetic nature of Diablo Cody's antiheroine, but I don't hear nearly enough about the flipside of Theron's work: She is absolutely fucking funny. If the Academy wants to offer up Melissa McCarthy as a shock vote of confidence in raunchy comedy, they'd be smarter to recalibrate their criteria and vote for Theron, whose version of humor conveys all of Bridesmaids's explicitness, but with the added strengths of rancor, unflinching realism and a hefty slice of the grotesque.
1. Vanessa Redgrave, Coriolanus
I've never understood the praise heaped on Redgrave (or Jason Robards, for that matter) for her Oscar-winning work in Julia, and I'm thrilled to say her Academy cred is revived, vivified and more in-your-face undeniable than ever thanks to her work in Coriolanus. As Fiennes's fiercely supportive and coercive mother Volumnia, Redgrave tangles with a mess of difficult, jarringly confrontational dialogue and emerges as something of a hybrid between a raging sorceress and a dehumanized beggar. While Fiennes stalks the screen with a face full of blood, the roaring Redgrave's astonishment is a ghastlier sight; in every glance she emits Lady Macbeth's dictatorial conviction and Medea's billowing madness -- all while seeming like a plausible resident of the film's CNN-gritty dystopia. Fiennes goes to great pains to format Shakespeare's work into a 2011 news ticker, but Redgrave's work is a huge and heart-pounding achievement for any age.
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