Ranking The Academy Award For Best Actress Winners' Performances From The Past Decade

Meryl Streep, the actress that every other actress or actor wants to be. She has played everything from loveable to hated, indifferent to devastating. It's hard to pick which Streep performance has been the best over the past decade because she has simply been better than the rest consistently.

Fawning out of the way, she played Margaret Thatcher, which really could have only gone down well with about half of Britain, being that the other half hated the woman. The film was pretty well brushed aside in all other respects, being that it was too self-indulgent in trying to depict Thatcher as a universally loved legend.

For her part, Streep became Thatcher in the same way she has become so many people over the years: in her entirety. No performance from Meryl Streep has been downright bad, which is what makes her so special. It's that her role in the film is let down by just about everything else.

In the end, it was by virtue of Meryl Streep's name being Meryl Streep that the film got the attention it did. In the years since it has gone down as 'that film about Margaret Thatcher, yeah, haven't seen it'.

When looking at the competition for Streep, it paints a damning picture that The Academy and other institutions gave her the award because it had simply been too long and she'd been nominated too much without winning since 1983. Viola Davis, Rooney Mara, Glenn Close and Michelle Williams all gave better in better films that year.

Verdict: Undeserved. Anybody else should have won.