My 10 favourite performances of 2016.

I've done the trash performances list, now for the good eggs!

10. Emily Blunt, The Girl on the Train

Clown music film is clown music, but Emily Blunt really deserves a shout-out on this list, for working her ass off in The Girl on the Train. Her unvain performance as a pathetic alcoholic was spot-on. 

Moonlit dreams.

As I said in my prediction post, I didn’t watch the Oscars live on Sunday, because I anticipated a La La Land sweep, culminating in it winning 8 Oscars, including Best Picture.

In fact, it did win six of the eight I’d predicted it to. It did not, graciously, take Best Sound, because the superlative that should be awarded to its sound is quite the opposite of ‘best’.

But the real miracle was that it also didn’t win Best Picture.

Ranked: the 2017 Best Picture nominees (part 2)

Part 1, aka the three I disliked the most, were discussed here. Now for 5-1, ranging from 'I quite enjoyed with, with reservations' to 'I absolutely bloody loved it'.

05. Lion

Ranking of 2017 Best Supporting Actor nominees.

I love analysing the Oscar categories and if it were up to me, I would have analysed all of them between the announcement of the nominations and the Oscar ceremony next Sunday. However, this was sadly unfeasible due to the fact that I live in the UK and tricky UK release dates meant I hadn’t seen a bunch of the nominated films.

I’ve only now watched enough films to analyse one category, Supporting Actor, and in terms of discussing the nominees, I’m deferring to Nathaniel’s method on the Supporting Actress Smackdown of a discrete score out 5, as opposed to my more convoluted grading system, where sometimes there wasn’t much in it between two performances, yet I gave one a B+ and the other an A-, which seemed a tad spurious.

So without further ado, my rankings of the nominated performances, from worst to best…

05. Dev Patel as ‘Saroo’ in Lion (**/*****)