Best Actress: Serious Film's 2012 Ballot

Just like with Oscar ballots I'm weighting these with #1 as my top choice and so on down the list. I have not yet seen Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Smashed or Emayatzi Corinealdi in Middle of Nowhere.

1. Rachel Weisz - The Deep Blue Sea

Weisz reached a career peak in Terrence Davies adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea. It is a performance all the more powerful for its restraint. Her Hester is coming undone with romantic obsession but there are no hysterics, no tearful, screaming Oscar bait breakdowns. Just a woman drowning, bit by bit, one emotional injury at a time. 

2. Emmanuelle Riva - Amour

Even with great acting you can still find yourself thinking about it, objectively, as a performance. This is not the case with Riva. There is nothing extraneous on her performance, nothing added for effect. She simply is this poor suffering woman, visible even when her humanity is almost entirely obscured by her illness. Which is not to suggest a lack of craft, of course. It's simply craft on a level actors don't often reach.

3. Leslie Mann - This is 40

Judd Apatow takes a lot of grief over his weakness for indulging actors with extended improv and lengthy running times, but when he's got a star like Mann center stage it's easy to understand why he falls in love with every frame. She manages to be consistently real in an often painful portrait of a struggling marriage, while simultaneously snagging every potential laugh along the way. For an idea what an achievement that is just stop and think about how rarely it's done.

4. Jessica Chastain - Zero Dark Thirty

Just as director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal marhsal a mountain of details into a snapshot of the war on terror, Jessica Chastain builds one of 2012's most memorable characters through a subtle accumulation of small choices. The skill of her work is almost invisible until the film's final moments, when the burden of the meaning shifts onto its obsessive protagonist and she sums up an unfathomable amount of sacrifice with her numb emptiness in the face of "victory".

5. Melanie Lynskey - Hello, I Must Be Going

There were plenty of strong contenders for this spot, but scene for scene, line for line, there wasn't another 2012 performance that delighted me as consistently as Lynskey's. As Amy, Lynskey plays an increasing familiar type: the maturity-impaired adult retreating from grown-up responsibility. Yet Lynskey grounds Amy in such a sharp specificity she keeps it well clear of cliche territory. Amy is both utterly stuck and painfully self-aware. The charm of Lynskey's performance is her ability to show that Amy herself can scarcely believe how deeply she's dug herself into a rut.

Five More

Jennifer Lawrence - Silver Linings Playbook, Marion Cotillard - Rust and Bone, Keira Knightley - Anna Karenina, Melissa Leo - Francine, Quvenzhané Wallis - Beasts of the Southern Wild

2012 Ballots

Picture 

Lead Actor

Supporting Actor

Original Screenplay

Adapted Screenplay

Costumes

Cinematography

Production Design

Editing

Score

Song

Sound Mixing and Sound Effects