The nominations for the 2009 Kaedrin Movie Awards were announced last week. This week, I’ll be announcing two winners every day, culminating in a post with my top 10 movies of the year and possibly some other wrap-up posts.
Best Comedic Performance: Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover
Truth be told, I’m cheating with this one because the award isn’t so much because Galifianakis was the funniest part of the movie, just that the movie was probably the funniest of the year. For some reason, there weren’t any really standout comedic performances this year. Sacha Baron Cohen was certainly an option, but after Borat, his shock value seems to have waned for me. Bruno was all about shock value, and once you got accustomed to it, it fell a little flat. I also seriously considered giving this to Michael Peña, but I think his role ended up being a little too small, and while he was fantastic, the movie wasn’t really that funny (but it was still a solid movie, just not in a straightforward comedic way). In any case, this was a difficult award and I’m not entirely happy picking a winner… I guess being nominated will have to be award enough…
Breakthrough Performance: Tom Hardy in Bronson
Another impossible category, except this time there were too many standouts. I would be happy giving the award to any of the nominees, but in looking at the criteria I had laid out for this award, I had to go with Hardy because I had seen him before and totally dismissed him as an actor. Yes, he played the villain from the absolutely terrible Star Trek: Nemisis, and despite looking almost the same, he’s a completely different actor in this movie. He’s a total force of nature and his performance is really what holds an otherwise uneven movie together. The real competition for the award comes from Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, who I’ve already established as being fantastic (having won the Best Villain award). I also totally fell in love with Rinko Kikuchi in The Brothers Bloom. I was surprised to learn that her previous high-profile role was a rather serious one in Babel… yet her comedic timing in the underrated Bloom was spot-on. In the end, it comes back to the forceful performance of Tom Hardy.
Next up: Most Visually Stunning and Best Sci-Fi or Horror Film