RIP: The 5 Best Performances of 2012 Without the Slightest Bit of a Chance in Hell

It came with a great shock and awe when Nicole Kidman's trashy Southern belle performance in The Paperboy netted the Academy Award winner nominations from both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.  The road to the Oscar for the critically reviled Lee Daniels' gothic nor is tremulous at best, even for an actress with the refinement and temperament of someone like Kidman shepherding away.  While I, personally, couldn't really go on board with The Paperboy, I strongly admire the dedication and craft and deft hidden skill of Kidman's performance and greatly applaud the out-of-left-field choice, even if perhaps its a bit smeared by the fact the Hollywood Foreign Press likely nominated her more so that she would attend the fancy show versus the strength and magnitude of her performance.  Cynicism aside, it's great when choices like this are made by merit, instead of all-encompassing, often sadly confining choices typically made by what's been pre-selected as an "awards film."  Here are 5 other performances that shouldn't have been overlooked:

Emily Blunt in Looper
Blunt has had a pretty impressive 2012, with nicely modulated turns in The Five-Year Engagement, Your Sister's Sister, Looper and Salmon Fishing on the Yemen.  She received a random Golden Globe nomination for the latter, but it was her performance in Rian Johnson's dazzling science fiction feature that was the most fascinating.  At first nearly unrecognizable, exhibiting a raw toughness she has never really showcased before, she paints a vivid performance as young woman who would do anything to protect her child.  As introduced as a rifle-toting alpha, Blunt carefully and exquisitely unveils hidden vulnerabilities and maternal good-naturedness, while casually transgressing the archetypes of the noir vixen at the same time.  In a fairly weak Best Supporting Actress line-up, her's was one of the strongest, and is worthy of a nod alongside the locks of the category-- a French prostitute, bio-polar First Lady, and sex surrogate.

Michael Fassbender in Prometheus
Shamelessly snubbed last year for his incomparable work in the tough indie Shame, Fassbender went another direction in 2012 as the mysterious humanoid David in Ridley Scott's massively hyped and slightly underwhelming Alien origin story.  However, Fassbender, with his magnetic charisma and always intoxicating intensity bridged a few of the thematic boggles with an ingenuity and mystery and even an elegance.  We were never quite sure what was triggering David, aside from his obsession with Peter O'Toole and Lawrence of Arabia, but he bestowed such a credulous interest that he's work feels as deserving of trophies and plaudits just as much as those in the more "prestige" films.

Eva Green in Dark Shadows
Mere best in show honors seems like too small a praise for Green's remarkably agile performance in Tim Burton's massive dud- a retooling of the popular? soap opera.  I honestly believe that if the film, a shaky rehashing and dumping ground of past Burton forays, had been on line with the way that Green portrays the slinky, funny, dangerous, sexy villain Angelique, it would have been a ghoulishly fun ride.  As is, it's mostly a mess, but like Kidman in The Paperboy, Green's choices, line readings and allure cast a wider net than the sum of her films drifting parts.  Charismatic, fetching and adroitly playing to room, as her co-stars are slumping for pay day, Green was the best thing in a bad thing all year long.

Channing Tatum in 21 Jump Street
It was the year of Channing, like it or not, and even ones not quite wise to the charms that led 2012's sexiest man alive to churn out three films to grosses north of $100, one would be hard pressed to not be charmed, amused and elated by his masterfully on the nose supporting performance in 21 Jump Street.  Playing half of a team of cops sent back to high school, Tatum's sweet dim bulb showcases a versatility, grand sense of play, and a knack for comic timing, that counts as one of the biggest cinematic surprises of the year.  That he imbues an honest sensitivity to the broadly stretched raunchiness is a small miracle.

Charlize Theron in Snow White & the Huntsman
Unjustly ignored in 2011 for her bravura turn in the dark comedy Young Adult, Theron further found her grove in bitchiness as the Evil Queen in one of the thousand or so takes on Grimm classic this year.  Playing up the vanity and clearly having a ball, she merely saves Snow White & the Huntsman from the eternal doldrums of self-seriousness, but underlies her evilness with a grand connection with the scope, tremor and insecurity of her most powerful weapon-- her beauty.  Theron continued to be fairest of them all, but awards season probably won't pay much attention-- they usual prefer they're beautiful to de-glam for their art.

Screen Actors Guild Nominations

Les Miserables nets SAG nominations for Ensemble, Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and Best Stunts!

ENSEMBLE CAST
Argo
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Les Miserables
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook 

ACTOR
Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
John Hawkes, The Sessions
Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables
Denzel Washington, Flight 

ACTRESS
Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Marion Cotillard, Rust & Bone
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Helen Mirren, Hitchcock
Naomi Watts, The Impossible 

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Alan Arkin, Argo
Javier Bardem, Skyfall
Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln 

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Sally Field, Lincoln
Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Nicole Kidman, The Paperboy
Maggie Smith, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

STUNT ENSEMBLE
The Amazing Spider-man
The Bourne Legacy
The Dark Knight Rises
Les Miserables
Skyfall

The biggest and most delightful surprise from the Screen Actors Guild comes in the form of recognizing the great performance of Nicole Kidman in the otherwise none so great The Paperboy.  While surely the sight and spectacle of the great actress and movie star to come to the ceremony might have been potential enough for the voting this singular creation, it still stands as a superior move on the part of actors appreciating great acting.  Kidman saunters and teases as a white trash tart in Lee Daniels' mess of a feature with such a confidence and stature and all consuming passion that there's little doubt with whom best of show honors rightfully belong to.  Alongside that, there was little surprises, aside from the Javier Bardem's inclusion for playing villain to James Bond in Skyfall and the prominence of this summer's octogenarian hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which netted Ensemble acting mentions alongside Supporting Actress Maggie Smith.  Joaquin Phoenix was shut out for The Master in a tough category, while Marion Cotillard, Naomi Watts and Helen Mirren skirted into the definitely in flux Best Actress category.  Whilst critical favorite Zero Dark Thirty just has Jessica Chastain to claim as nominee, and Django Unchained lies snubbed.  Thoughts?  How do you think they did?

The Paperboy

The Paperboy is set in a particularly swamp-infested part of Florida circa 1969.  A noir, a sudser, provocation and auterial nut house of a movie, inverted and twisted with indelicate pacing by director Lee Daniels, in his follow-up to Precious, settling, I'm assuming once and for all, that the Oscar-honored 'Based on a novel Push by Sapphire', may have truly been a fluke.  The Paperboy is a mess.  A lurid, humidity-rising tale of a death row inmate, his pen pal lover, the journalists brought along to investigate the crime, and the young paperboy in the middle, The Paperboy, under Daniel's unstable hand tries to be many things at once.  A picaresque period film, or which his team has a lot of fun with inventively period specific production designs, costumes and rendering his images as if they came from that period, yet it's also a hothouse, nearly gratuitous exploitation film as well.  Worst of all, Daniels expresses and filters his coming-from-directions with seemingly sanctimonious examinations of race and sexuality, nearly all of which comes across didactic and more and more off center.  What were left with is pervy, art house kitsch masquerading as art, curiously designed by a filmmaker who has never appears more ego-centric nor full of themselves in attempts to throw away all the rules.

The most fascinating and bewitching component in this trashy endeavor is Nicole Kidman's radiant performance, once that shifts from the mercurial to the deranged in a fly.  Playing a lower class Southern belle named Charlotte, this gutsy, gonzo force of a creation would be viewed as a master class in acting had the stuff surrounding her white trashy gal not been quite so trashy itself.  Charlotte's hobby, or fetish, or something is writing letters to prisoners-- had the film any backbone or substance, we might understand this behavior at least slightly, what we're left with is grand, out there notes from Kidman that express and intrigue as the film confounds and folds in on itself.  Charlotte falls for Hilary Van Wetter (John Cusack, doing his best Nicolas Cage impression), a lifer nearing the green mile when an investigation is reopened by two Miami reporters named Ward and Yardley (Matthew McConaughey and David Oyelowo.)  Along for the ride is Ward's younger brother Jack, a once collegiate swimming prodigy, now horny toad young man wiling away as a paperboy for his father.  Jack is played by Zac Efron, in an attempt to grow from past his Disney awe-shucks roots, all of which might be seen as slightly more impressive had Daniels' not fetishized the twinkly matinee idol with extended long shots of the actor in his underwear.  The story, if there really is one, is mostly from Jack's point of view and the hot days and nights surrounding the investigation and his growing lust with Charlotte.

Based on the novel by Pete Dexter (who co-wrote the film with Daniels), there's a sense that there might be a nifty B-level potboiler to the tale.  The actors are certainly all game, and do the most with the insane shenanigans that Daniels sets out for them, but there's politics involved as well.  The film gets too caught up with the sexual and racial morays of the period to fully let them become entwined with the story.  Oyelowo, Ward's partner, in particular reads like a morally loose spin on Sidney Poitier's In the Heat of the Night character, while Macy Gray, playing both narrator and good-natured housekeeper to Jack's family is something right of The Help.  The sexual politics becomes even murkier as Ward's demons start to surface.  And what may have read or seemed as examined by Daniels, is at times preachy when it's not utterly detestable.  D+

The Paperboy trailer: Or the Film Where Nicole Kidman famously urinates on Zac Efron

The full trailer for The Paperboy, Lee Daniels' follow-up to his 2009's Oscar-heralded Precious made an auspicious debut at this years Cannes Film Festival, and it's perhaps easy to see why from its impression.  Tonally all over the place, a Southern Gothic noir that pins Kidman as Southern trash, and Efron, the unlikeliest, as her leading man.  Millennium Films is bravely releasing this one as an awards hopeful, perhaps on balsiness alone.