3. Jennifer Lawrence - Winter's Bone
Jennifer Lawrence's performance as Ree in the indie hit Winter's Bone proved to be far from a mere one-off success from a talented young actress, but rather proved top be an announcement of a new star and one of the strongest female thespian forces in the business. As impressive as the performance in the film is, both the movie and the role feel a bit inauspicious for your typical "star-maker" roles, but luckily merit actually won out for once, and a mere two years later Jennifer Lawrence has become an A-list superstar and an Oscar-winning actress. Playing a teenage girl from an impoverished family in the Ozark mountains of Missouri, Jennifer Lawrence's Ree is forced to become the "man of the house" after her father puts up their household for bail and then is nowhere to be found. In order to keep the house from going into foreclosure, so that she can maintain a roof over the head of her younger brother and sister as well as along her emotionally shot mother, Ree is forced to do some investigative digging into the dark criminal underbelly of her extended family's crystal meth business. The unwritten rules of the land are "look straight ahead and don't ask questions", so the perturbation caused by Ree's inquiries into her father's whereabouts are none too welcome by her larger hillbilly family who are far from the warm "milk and cookie" variety that many associate with the word. Determined not to let her family become completely destitute, Ree perseveres with the reluctant help from her uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes), despite the mounting threat from her drug-dealing kin. This undeterred perseverance ("true grit" you might even say, to borrow a saying from one of the year's other Oscar contenders) is the most memorable feature of Lawrence's performance. Whatever comes her way, she stays the course, willing to do what is necessary (even if it means losing her life) in order to save the land and house she lives on. This is not only communicated through Lawrence's dialogue, but also through her eyes, as her determined stare never once wavers. The only weakness (if you want to call it that) that keeps me from ranking the performance higher, is this one-note is pretty much all there is to the performance. The movie is the cinematic equivalent of Donkey Kong perpetually throwing barrels for Mario to jump over, and we never get to see Lawrence's Ree out of her Mario-mode. Regardless, it is still a great performance and the pronouncement of the arrival of what I think may be, looking back many years from now, one of the best actresses to emerge in quite some time.