AFT Awards: Best Actress in a Leading Role

This is the second category of the 3rd Annual AFT Film Awards to be announced. The AFT Awards are my own personal choices for the best in film of each year and the best in television of each season. The AFT Film Awards include the traditional Oscar categories and a number of additional specific honors. Nominees are pictured in the order I’ve ranked them and drawn from a pool of approximately 92 films. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order):
Amy Adams (Julie & Julia), Marion Cotillard (Nine), Zooey Deschanel (500 Days of Summer), Helen Mirren (The Last Station), Julia Roberts (Duplicity), Meg Ryan (Serious Moonlight), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious), Audrey Tautou (Coco Before Chanel)

Runners-up:
ABBIE CORNISH (Bright Star)
MICHELLE MONAGHAN (Trucker)
MAYA RUDOLPH (Away We Go)
ELLEN PAGE (Whip It)
EMILY BLUNT (The Young Victoria)

The winner:
Carey Mulligan (An Education) was wonderfully charming and delightful as a young girl with a bright future ahead of her and an adventurous desire to see and experience the world.

Other nominees:
Tilda Swinton (Julia) held nothing back as an alcoholic woman actively working to mess her life up and provided a mesmerizing portrait of someone dealing with bad decisions. Penelope Cruz (Broken Embraces) lit up the screen the moment she appeared as an aspiring actress with two men with an eternally sunny disposition. Meryl Streep (Julia & Julia) let loose and had fun cooking up a storm in a commendable imitation of the incomparable Julia Child. Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones) gave a tour de force performance at age 15 as a murdered girl who has far more to experience than just her life, and anchored a movie far beneath her talents.