Best Supporting Actress: Lesley Manville in Phantom Thread The past year saw no shortage of movie-stealing performances from formidable women in supporting roles, from Laurie Metcalf to Tiffany Haddish to Holly Hunterโeach of whom elevates her respective film, bringing it somehow more vividly to life.
But Lesley Manville as Cyril, with her deft take on the Mrs. Danvers archetype, achieves something altogether singular. Initially, her Cyril is the model of perfect control: stoic, brutally direct, unmoved by impulsive emotion. Instead, Cyril becomes an unlikely ally to Almaโfor reasons she attributes, compellingly enough, to fondnessโthus disrupting the tenuous emotional balance of the House of Woodcock. That the same actress has given us both of these complicated, haunting, and yet completely different women is nothing less than astonishing.
But this is Alexander Payne, a major American filmmaker who has attained success while managing to keep his art attuned to the grubby realities of life for those in flyover America. And sometimes you just look across the room during an orgy in the basement of a blue-and-red-light-drenched gay sex club at a. Worst Bad Sex: Song to Song Amidst his many crimes, Mephistophelean music executive Cook Michael Fassbender, who also won this honor in for Shame leads kindergarten teacher Rhonda Natalie Portman down the wrong path, initiating her into a life of shame and regret typified by both drug use and coercion into an m-f-f threesome from psychedelics to poisonous lesbianismโshock to shock!
Worst Good Sex: The Shape of Water When your only other option seems to be a sadistic sociopath who thinks your muteness is your most attractive quality, then I suppose the scaly creature from the black lagoon might seem like a good bet for a boink.
But I still wished that Sally Hawkins could get it on with someone a little less amphibious before relocating forever to the bottom of the damn ocean. That their allegory for race relations in the U. Bright takes place in a bland VFX Los Angeles where Orcs are persecuted for siding with the Dark Lord two millennia ago, and are meant to signify Latinx and African-Americans in our worldโeven though racism against the latter two groups clearly exists in this imagined one.
