4. Best Supporting Actress - Meryl Streep (Into The Woods)
Even for dyed-in-the-wool fans of the musical genre, Into The Woods wasn't exactly a run-away success. For some reason it missed the spectacle of Les Miserables and lost something in the translation from stage to screen that should have given its fantasy elements even more cause and scope for celebration. Perhaps that was because the stage play had been forced to adapt to its limits, and freeing them meant compromising on something inherently appealing. For her part, Meryl Streep is probably offers the best performance (James Corden's endearign charm only gets you so far, and Chris Pine is undermined terribly by an accidental, distracting similarity to William Shatner), but it's a very, very generous role that doesn't really require much in the way of substance. Her witch - inevitably - is a pantomime creation, and it's a little disheartening to think it could be classed as among the five best of the year. Why It Went Wrong... It's Meryl Streep. If she's in a film, there's a good chance she's going to get nominated whether it's brilliant or banal.