Dracula Presents: The Ninth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Racist.

Best Supporting Actress
Throughout award season this category has been beset by “category confusion” and I’ve tried my best to navigate that while also looking for unsung performances that haven’t gotten their due this year. These actresses all had to do a lot with a little and many of them excelled.

Sarah Paulson- Carol: She’s been somewhat overshadowed by the other two ladies in Carol but she’s also a very important part of the movie as Carol’s previous paramour and ongoing friend and ally. Paulson is important to the movie in that she’s the only of these three women who seems to be fully “out” and not recently in a relationship with a man and is notably more feisty and combative than the other two. Paulson captures this and paints a clear picture of this woman despite some relatively limited screentime.

Kristen Stewart- Clouds of Sils Maria: We need to stop being surprised when young actors and actresses end up giving stellar performances when they get better material to work with than the soulless crap that Hollywood gives them. In Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria she plays an assistant to a famous French actress but not a long suffering one so much as a faithful companion who can converse with her as an equal.

Zhang Huiwen- Coming Home: Coming Home didn’t get a lot of press stateside but it had some really strong performances and the real surprise breakout was from a twenty two year old former ballet dancer who had never acted before named Zhang Huiwen who must play a character at two different ages and in two different ways, being petulant and immature at one age and tortured and frustrated at the other.

Jennifer Jason Leigh- The Hateful Eight: Quentin Tarantino more or less built Christoph Waltz’ career by making him a sort of smiling devil and he does something similar with Jennifer Jason Leigh here. Leigh is a consistently menacing presence in The Hateful Eight despite the fact that she doesn’t do a whole lot of evil while actually on screen. What’s more she very capably adopts the rough demeanor of a profane frontier woman that’s pretty far removed from what we’ve seen from her before.

Rachel Weisz- Youth: One of the year’s most unsung performances was that of Rachel Weisz as the long suffering daughter/manager of Michael Caine’s central character, but of course Weisz has generally been an underappreciated actress over the course of her career. Weisz is actually one of the younger major actors in Youth but she definitely holds her own among the likes of Caine, Harvey Keitel, and Jane Fonda.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

The angry college-aged and Target employed Dracula of 2009 would beat up the Dracula of 2016 for giving Kristen Stewart a Golden Stake award.

Anna Kendrick was a small part of Twilight. It was easy to forgive her.

Her total screen time from all 5 movies is probably 10 minutes.

Best Actress
All too often the actress category is harder to fill up than the actor category as a result of the differences in the opportunities for the two genders, but that definitely wasn’t the case this year. The actress category was extremely competitive and I needed to leave some strong contenders out of the nominees this year.

Charlotte Rampling- 45 Years: Charlotte Rampling is something of a legend of British film but has never really gotten the career honors that the Judi Denches, Helen Mirrans, Maggie Smiths have. Her work in 45 Years was an excellent reminder of just how skilled and important she is as an actress. This is the kind of movie where very little is spoken and the movie is highly dependent on its star being able to convey her character’s emotional tumult in order for the film to make sense and Rampling knocks it out of the park.

Saoirse Ronan- Brooklyn: Saoirse Ronan began her career as a child actor in some fairly high profile films like Atonement and The Lovely Bones and even still seemed pretty young in last year’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, but in Brooklyn she really seems like she’s finally entered into the realm of adult roles and more than stakes her claim to a certain sort of prestige stardom. She does a great job of subtly giving her character an increase in confidence over the course of the film to the point where she really seems different by the end.

Cate Blanchett- Carol: At the Oscars Cate Blanchett was considered to be the lead of Carol while Rooney Mara was considered to be the supporting actress, but I think the two actresses are clearly co-leads… but that only one was ultimately award worthy in this commutative year. Mara certainly does good work in the film, but her part really forces her to hold back while Blanchett is allowed to show a wider range of emotion beyond “repressed longing.” Her character is a lot more passionate and also a bit more ambiguous given that you’re never quite sure how noble her overtures are.

Juliette Binoche- Clouds of Sils Maria: Juliette Binoche has been one of the “big three” of French actresses (along with Julie Delpy and Marion Cotillard) for years now to the point where it’s easy to take her for granted. In Clouds of Sils Maria she plays an actress who’s going through something of a crisis after the death of the playwright she owes her career to has died. There’s no major hook that Binoche hangs her performance on but she does a great job of making the character feel real and subtly express her emotional undercurrent.

Brie Larson- Room: Brie Larson showed a lot of promise two years ago in the film Short Term 12 but I’m not sure anyone really expected that this promise would evolve so quickly into something this great. In Room Larson is required to portray a character who is beaten down by her predicament but also able to convey a lot of motherly love and at the same time show the relative immaturity of a young woman who was cut off from society right in her teen years.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

I thought Ronan was great. She's my choice.

To quote Jon Stewart, he's a young Al Pacino.

You're saying Bane isn't his best performance?

The Academy will likely see it that way too. I wouldn't call the performance overrated, but I do think DiCaprio has done better work, particularly in The Aviator and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Best Line
Throwing around quotes is something of a pastime among film buffs and fortunately there’s a new batch of potential classic lines that comes along every year. That said this award is more about the process of constructing a perfect little bit of writing than it is about creating something that is going to be widely quoted and to be nominated the line does need to have a certain ring to it when read out of context.

“Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and I'll have my wife's brother arrested.” - The Big Short: One of the things that made the 2008 Wall Street crash so infuriating is that in many ways it happened because markets had been deregulated to the point where it wasn’t at all clear if the causes of the crash were illegal at all to begin with and even if they were the regulators were so asleep at the wheel that the people on the ground didn’t even think to be afraid of them. This line, said by the Ryan Gosling character in response to the Steve Carrell character’s shock about how stupid and fraudulent the real estate market had become, illustrates that state of affairs and attitude while also being a funny in-law joke.

“My name is Donovan, Irish, both sides, mother and father. I’m Irish, you’re German. But what makes us both Americans? Just one thing. One, only one: the rulebook. We call it the Constitution and we agree to the rules, and that's what makes us Americans. It’s all that makes us Americans so don’t tell me there’s no rulebook and don’t nod at me like that you son of a bitch.” – Bridge of Spies: This little speech comes into Bridge of Spies during a scene where someone from the CIA approaches Hanks’ character attempting to get privileged information about his client expecting the lawyer to not take this prisoner’s rights seriously because he’s an alleged traitor and alleges that there’s “no rulebook here.” Clearly he gets a bit of a mouthful in response. The speech cuts to the core of the film’s message and is also delivered very eloquently as only Tom Hanks can. Watch the scene sometime and admire how eloquently he takes the hostility out of that insult at the end.

“Gentlemen, I know Americans aren't apt to let a little thing like unconditional surrender get in the way of a good war. But I strongly suggest we don’t restage The Battle of Baton Rouge during a blizzard in Minnie’s Haberdashery.” -The Hateful Eight: This line, spoken by Tim Roth’s character, is both amusing in its construction and is also where Tarantino shows his hand a bit as to what is going on in this movie because Oswaldo’s advice is definitely not heeded. The whole movie is all about the post war tensions between everyone in the room and this line finds an amusing way to call this out without seeming wildly on the nose and also bringing out the character’s claims at being something of a neutral arbiter of this situation.

“Congratulations San Francisco, you’ve ruined Pizza. First the Hawaiians and now you” – Inside Out: You can tell that Lewis Black, who was cast as the voice of anger, is having to restrain himself a lot in order to keep things PG in this Pixar movie, but occasionally you see him cut loose a bit. This line, which comes in response to the title character being offered Broccoli Pizza at a funky San Francisco pizzeria. In its form this is very much the kind of line you’d hear from an adult stand-up comedian, but I do like how this comes in the context of a very childlike reaction to a vegetable and how it reflects the character’s anxiety about her new home.

“In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option, I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this” - The Martian: I’ll be honest, looking at this line on the page and out of context it makes me cringe just a little, and the same can sort of be said about a lot of the lines in this movie. However, when you’re watching it in the movie and understand the feelgood vibe it’s going for it really makes sense. This is not an original quote, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that terminology elsewhere, but the audacity to have a character just come out and say it in a huge movie like this is pretty cool.

And the Golden Stake goes to…