The 2014 RopeofSilicon Movie Awards

Based on the number of runners-up, you’ll see this wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make (I also decided not to cap the list of runners-up at four this year), and in the end I simply went with the one performance that stuck with me the most, that being Jake Gyllenhaal‘s spectacular turn in Nightcrawler. Driven to a level of success most of us would never consider, Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom is a character that does some of the most deplorable things and yet it’s still hard for me to judge him too harshly. After all, Bloom is only capturing the news most of us eat up on a daily basis and as much as that fact remains, it’s still Gyllenhaal’s performance that prevented me from outright hating this character. Instead, I found myself exploring ways to sympathize or reason with what he’s doing. “He wouldn’t be doing it if people weren’t buying it,” I would tell myself, and it’s true. Bloom’s honest approach to what he’s doing and Gyllenhaal’s ability to not only sell everyone in the film as well as the audience on what he’s doing is masterful.

Now as much as I love Gyllenhaal’s work from last year, it was hard not selecting the likes of Ralph Fiennes (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Tom Hardy (Locke, The Drop), David Oyelowo (Selma) and Antoine Olivier Pilon (Mommy). Reason could be made for each as Fiennes owned Grand Budapest, Hardy carried a film all on his own while driving in a car for 90 minutes, Oyelowo delivered some of the most powerful lines of the year and Pilon embodied a character both troubled and endearing to spectacular dramatic effect. It was a great year for male actors and I had to pick only one as the “best”, but it’s clear he wasn’t alone.

I really don’t believe this was much of a competition. No female performance from last year had an affect on me the way Rosamund Pike did in David Fincher‘s Gone Girl. Soft spoken and cold to the core, the “Amazing” Amy was a character for the ages and as fucked up as Gone Girl is, none of what takes place works unless Pike nails that role. She had plenty of talented support around her — Carrie Coon, Tyler Perry, Kim Dickens — and Ben Affleck did his part, but it isn’t until we get “Cool Girl” driving down the freeway that Gone Girl begins to sing. The depravity of the film is finally felt and you never, ever know what she’s going to do next.

As far as the runners-up are concerned, I think Emily Blunt once again proves she can star opposite nearly anyone and the film is immediately elevated by her presence, Anne Dorval is part of the 1-2-3 punch of Xavier Dolan‘s latest, Tessa Thompson had a huge coming out party this year and Agata Trzebuchowska gives one of the most powerfully expressive performacnes of the year in Ida. While there might not be as many great, leading roles for women in movies, there are some great women for the roles that are out there.

Whiplash is the story of Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller). So, as much as people may consider J.K. Simmons‘ performance as Fletcher to be a leading role, I think it speaks largely to the overall power Simmons brings to the role that makes you think that. You don’t walk away from Whiplash thinking about Andrew as much as you walkaway wholly terrified of the man throwing chairs and shouting expletives into Andrew’s ear.

Is Fletcher a villain? Is his way of “teaching” positive or negative? You begin sorting out these kinds of questions all before you begin asking yourself where Andrew goes from here once the credits begin to roll. As someone that has played sports all his life I saw Fletcher as a hard-nosed coach, someone that coaxes the best out of his players and challenges them to be better than they ever thought they could be and it takes a masterful performance to look at a character in this way and not as a man born purely out of the fiery pits of Hell. Simmons is wonderful in this part and deserves all the accolades he’s received.

Now I look at that list of runners-up and wow, what a cast The Grand Budapest Hotel had and I didn’t even include Matheiu Amalric, whom I loved in that film. Birdman was also loaded from top to bottom and yes, Stanley Tucci in Transformers: Age of Extinction was wonderful, I’m sorry if that bothers you, but facts are facts. Oh, and who would have ever thought Tyler Perry would give us the performance he did in Gone Girl? Hell, I’d only seen him in a bit part in Star Trek and in the awful Alex Cross before seeing him in this flick and how Fincher saw him giving that performance I’ll never know, but I’m glad it worked out that way.

The list of ladies above is impressive as are all their performances, but just as I kept coming back to Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, I kept coming back to Rene Russo in the same way. When she says, “Think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut,” it’s one thing, but her fury with Lou Bloom when he doesn’t deliver is what sells it. There’s also the wonderful moral complexity when you consider the two characters. Both are dealing in depravity, but in vastly different ways. Who is the greater villain, the creator or the distributor? Lou is merely capturing Hell on camera (as well as manipulating a few things here and there) while Nina is addicted to it and feeding every bloody frame to the public.

Lou looks at it as a job while Nina’s soul seems to have become so scarred and numb by the industry she’s been working in she can’t even see what she’s become. By the end of the film I believe Lou knows what he’s become, but does Nina? It takes wonderful performances from each for us to even consider such questions given the depraved nature of what both characters are doing.

When it comes to the runners-up, this was one of the harder categories for me to decide. I almost wanted to give it to Carrie Coon because I think she’s been wrongly overlooked for her role in Gone Girl and I also felt it was important to give special attention to Dorothy Atkinson, her performance in Mr. Turner has also been overlooked, but the second half of that film falls flat on its face without her.