AFT Awards: Best Actress in a Leading Role

This is the second category of the 7th 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 100 films. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Honorable mentions:
Carmen Maura (Let My People Go!), Brit Marling (The East), Sandra Bullock (Gravity), Emmanuelle Devos (Just a Sigh), Cherien Dabis (May in the Summer), Teresa Palmer (Warm Bodies), Felicity Price (Wish You Were Here)

Runners-up:
Berenice Bejo (The Past)
Sofia Oria (Blancanieves)
Shailene Woodley (The Spectacular Now)
Trine Dyrholm (Love Is All You Need)
Judi Dench (Philomena)

The winner:
Adèle Exarchupoulos (Blue is the Warmest Color) was so incredibly naïve and curious as a young lesbian beginning an intense romance, and her amazed attitude is part of what made the film work so well.

Other nominees:
Scarlett Johansson (Her) gave an out-of-body performance that felt realer than almost anything else in the film (in a good way). Robin Weigert (Concussion) exuded an nervous but optimistic attitude about the new line of work her character finds herself in, and smartly underplayed what could have been an over-the-top role. Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Enough Said) was neurotic as usual but put a good sweet-natured twist on her typical character. Hadas Yaron (Fill the Void) was highly emotional but so marvelously composed as a devout young woman put into an impossible situation.