Dracula Presents: The Fifteenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Best Cameo
This category looks at the best appearance by an actor in a small role; sometimes that means a true cameo by a big celebrity who surprises audience and other times it’s meant more as just a general award for the best acting by someone (anyone) in a brief role. It tends to have a bit of a different flavor each year but this year I think all of my nominees find a good balance between both definitions of the category so I’m pretty satisfied.

Maya Hawke – Fear Street: Part 1 – 1994: The first of the Fear Street movies was a homage to the slasher films of the 1990s, most notably Scream. Like that Wes Craven film the movie gives us an opening in which we’re introduced to what we think will be the film’s protagonist, played by the most famous person in the cast, only to have them killed before the end of the first sequence. In terms of fame Maya Hawke is no Drew Barrymore… though both actresses do notably come from “Hollywood royalty” which I’m going to guess isn’t a coincidence and Hawke does a really good job of getting you invested in this character who will soon become a sacrificial lamb.

Barry Keoghan – The Green Knight: Eve though he somehow managed to play a Marvel superhero this year I feel like Barry Keoghan’s defining moment in 2021 was this five to ten minute cameo in David Lowery’s The Green Knight during the chapter called “…a Kindness,” in which he plays a commoner that Gawain encounters on the road. After an awkward exchange Keoghan’s unnamed character gives Gawain directions which turn out to be directions into an ambush. Keoghan then shows up “mask off” caring not one bit for Gawain’s nobility or the importance of his quest and ties him up, leading to one of the film’s most metaphysical and trippy shots. Keoghan kind of makes you sympathize with the classism that Gawain likely approaches this character with as he really feels like a bug to be squashed, and yet Gawain finds himself kind of powerless in the face of simple highway robbery.

Bradley Cooper – Licorice Pizza: Bradley Cooper had a hell of a December starring in a Guillermo del Toro and making a highlight appearance in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie within weeks of each other. In Licorice Pizza he plays Jon Peters a truly infamous personality in Hollywood history first for being a hairdresser/ladies’ man, then for hooking up with Barbra Streisand, and later for having various quirky ideas about how Superman should be depicted on screen. In the film out characters encounter him while doing a waterbed deliver and get into an argument about exactly how Streisand’s last name should be pronounced only to have things escalate into additional craziness from there. Cooper’s performance is absolutely feral and while the depiction of Peters is almost certainly exaggerated it certainly gets across just how much larger than life his reputation is.

Matt Damon – No Sudden Move: Matt Damon has made something of a career out of showing up unannounced to play large parts in the final acts of movies. He’s been doing it as far back as Saving Private Ryan and has also done it in movies like Interstellar and he does it once again here for his longtime collaborator Steven Soderbergh in his new movie No Sudden Move, where he plays an executive of some sort who turns out to have been pulling a lot of the strings in this whole wild heist situation and clearly kind of steps into the movie as something of a symbol for the power of capitalism in general. Apparently this surprise cameo was originally supposed to go to George Clooney, who was busy, but it also makes a lot of sense for Damon who has played this sort of privileged weasels before and is right at home in the role.

Bradley Whitford – Tick, Tick… Boom!: Stephen Sondheim, a giant of musical theater, passed away in the late November of 2021 and it is perhaps a testament to his stature that there were two major motion pictures premiering in the coming weeks that involved his legacy. There was of course West Side Story, which was an adaptation of one of his first works as a lyricist, and then there was Tick, Tick… Boom! in which he appears as a character who mentors a not yet famous Johnathan Larson. In that role he is potrayed by the actor Bradley Whitford, of “West Wing” and Get Out fame. I’ve only seen Sondheim in a handful of interviews over the years so I can’t say I’m an expert on his mannerisms, but Whitford’s performance certainly seemed accurate to me and according to interviews his work on the movie also led to a sub-cameo by the real Stephen Sondheim via voicemail.

And the Golden Stake Goes to…

Yeah, that one's hard to beat.

The 2nd best cameo of the year was also from Licorice Pizza.

Best Supporting Actress
Best Supporting Actress tends to be the least Oscar-aligned of the four acting categories I give Golden Stakes to and that tradition seems to be continuing this year. As of this writing the Oscar nominations have not come out but I’m pretty sure four of these five nominees have no chance of being picked by the Academy and the fifth is quite the longshot, but hey, we’ll see.

Daphne Patakia – Benedetta: Throughout Benedetta it’s meant to be something of a mystery as to whether the title character is truly seeing visions and believing in her prophesies, but her fellow nun and eventual lover Bartolomea definitely doesn’t believe them and acts as a fairly important counterpart to her in that she is pretty much the closest thing to an atheist in the film even though she suppresses that in order to enjoy the relative stability of the cloistered life. Relative newcomer Daphne Patakia does a great job of delineating this woman’s arc from her beginnings as an uncultured and abused country girl to the cunning sidekick for Benedetta.

Tōko Miura – Drive My Car: I don’t really know a lot about Tōko Miura. She’s twenty three years old and has about forty acting credits, a lot of them confined to Japanese television, and aside from that there’s not a lot of information. She doesn’t have an English Wikipedia page and I haven’t found many English language articles written about her. So as far as I’m concerned while watching the film the young woman driving the car in Drive My Car was an enigma, but one who found subtle ways to fascinate me throughout. There’s a blue-collar aspect to her character but you suspect she has some history and over the course of the film more is revealed of her and by the end she really needs to emote in a way you don’t expect from what we’ve seen previously.

Ann Dowd – Mass: Mass is a movie with four major characters and it kind of feels weird to call any of the four either lead or supporting, most award shows are taking an “everyone’s supporting” strategy and while I don’t always want to follow along with what everyone else is doing I guess I will in this case for the sake of simplicity. In the film Dowd plays a character who could almost seem comical in another context as she’s a sort of middle aged crafty woo-woo practitioner, but you can also tell she’s become that way out of a desire to fill the void left after being gutted by tragedy.

Milena Smit – Parallel Mothers: Much of the attention in Parallel Mothers has been paid toward Penelope Cruz working once again with Pedro Almodóvar but I was almost equally impressed by her scene partner, the relative newcomer Melena Smit. Smit is a woman in her very early twenties who starts the film playing a teenager and gets closer to her actual age as the film goes on. Motherhood, other events, and general maturation change her character quite a bit over the course of the film and Smit manages to channel this evolution really successfully.

Ruth Negga – Passing: Tessa Thompson has the larger and more relatable part in Passing but Ruth Negga’s character is more intriguing. In the role of Clare Bellew Negga needs to play someone who has been “passing” for most of her adult life and this along with the pressures that led her to do that in the first place have kind of warped her mind, not necessarily in the sense of clinical insanity, but she seems kind of oblivious to how she is going to be perceived by outsiders. It’s a tricky balance to accomplish, but I think Negga pulls it off and makes this person seem intriguing rather than annoying and she gives you the space for some empathy.

And the Golden Stake Goes to…

I dont think I even heard of Mass.

I like that you included Mike Faist in WSS, I was really impressed with his performance.

Best Actress
Another year another slate of Best Actress nominees. This is a particularly interesting group of five because three of the five nominees here are in their feature film debut and the oldest of the five actresses has largely been hidden away from audiences outside of a cinematically remote global region and these four are competing with one of the biggest celebrities in the world.

Alana Haim – Licorice Pizza: When watching Licorice Pizza I was not aware of who Alana Haim was. I was aware that a band called “Haim” existed but I hadn’t put two and two together so it was a bit of a surprised when I got home and fired up Wikipedia and figured out she was a rock star rather than an actress. Her character, however, is not a rock star at all. She’s an extremely awkward person but in a way that’s amusing rather than cringey and that’s a balance that’s harder to walk than you’d think and Haim gets past that using some really strong comic timing and a strong idea of who this character should be.

Jasna Đuričić - Quo Vadis, Aida?: I’m not exactly sure how to pronounce this actresses name but I was highly impressed by her role in Quo Vadis, Aida? where she plays a translator assisting with the UN during a tense situation in the Bosnian War who comes to realize she may be the only hope for saving her husband and sons from being the victims of a potential slaughter. We spend much of the movie watching her become increasingly tense while having to keep something of a poker face around commanding officers as the danger mounts. And then of course there’s what the film needs her to do in the epilogue, which is just exquisite.

Kristen Stewart – Spencer: As I said in my write-up of the last category, biopic performances are generally to be looked at with suspicion but they certainly can’t just be written off. Spencer is definitely a biopic of sorts that was done with the right intentions and Kristen Stewart met the challenge of her role as Princess Diana with aplomb. The two women certainly have a bit of a physical resemblance and Stewart does all the requisite biopic transformation stuff, but more importantly she (and the movie) are interested in getting beneath the surface and depicting her troubled psyche, but in a hopeful way.

Agathe Rousselle – Titane: Though she’s in her early thirties Agathe Rousselle made her feature length film debut in Titane, which is quite the trial by fire for a first timer. This is a performance which requires Rousselle to go through some pretty radical physical and mental transformations and bring the audience to a number of rather strange places over the course of the film’s running time and make the audience find some sympathy for a character who is, on paper, kind of hard to sympathize with. She not only manages to do all that but manages to be completely captivating through the whole movie with this absolutely fearless performance.

Renate Reinsve - The Worst Person in the World: Renate Reinsve made her film debut in a small part in Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st but is likely to otherwise be completely unknown to audiences outside of Norway; needless to say she’s made quite the first impression. In The Worst Person in the World Reinsve needs to really carry this film on her shoulders as it’s a movie that’s all about examining and deconstructing her character. It’s a tricky part to play as her character is a self-proclaimed “flake” who doesn’t always know what she wants and takes contradictory actions, but Reinsve really makes sense of all of this. It’s a performance where she needs to play a regular person but still bring a touch of the film star even if she’s essentially an unknown.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Best Actor
There’s some interesting things happening with this lineup, I think it’s the most Oscar aligned of my four acting categories, which isn’t saying much given that I’ve disagreed with the Academy a lot this year.

Peter Dinklage – Cyrano: Let’s be frank, Peter Dinklage is a guy who’s opportunities are somewhat limited in Hollywood. To some extent it’s a miracle that he’s managed to do as much as he has done but there is probably a ceiling to how much he’ll be allowed to accomplish so when he’s given the opportunity to star in a musical adaptation of Cyrano he went all in. There’s a bit of a theatricality to his performance here but he does do some really impressive stuff; he needs to swing from swaggering confidence to extreme self-consciousness pretty quickly and whenever he’s around Roxanne he really needs to hold back his friend-zoned agony. All the while he does a pretty credible job singing in baritone, something he doesn’t specialize in.

Lakeith Stanfield - Judas and the Black Messiah: Playing the Judas in Judas and the Black Messiah, Lakeith Stanfield plays a character that the film clearly views in a negative light and is ultimately fairly judgmental towards but never denies the humanity of. William O'Neal is actually a character who goes through quite a transformation over the course of the film, starting as something of a petty criminal and then becoming a seeming radical, albeit one who is only pretending to be a radical… or is he? And then of course there are the strong and conflicted emotions he needs to convey once it comes time to do the Judasing.

Benedict Cumberbatch – Power of the Dog: Benedict Cumberbatch, he of the absurdly English name, is perhaps not the first person you think of when casting a stubbornly grizzled rancher, but in some reason that’s why this is the right one for this part. Phil Burbank is a guy who very much identifies as a man’s man rancher and stubbornly refuses to budge from that image, but as the movie goes on you start to realize that this identity is also something of a pose, if perhaps a subconscious one, for the character and the extent to which Mr. Sherlock doesn’t quite fit into this milieu plays well into that and Cumberbatch pulls it off splendidly.

Simon Rex – Red Rocket: Sean Baker has made a career of getting great performances from unlikely people and oh boy was Simon Rex about as unlikely a person to deliver one of the year’s best performances as you could have found and yet he does some really amazing work in Red Rocket. Rex plays a character who seems to have been operating on something of a grift cadence through much of his adult life and who is scheming at all times, often right to people’s faces without the slightest bit of shame. Rex does this in such an effortless way that you hardly notice that he’s acting this whole time and has you laughing even as he’s doing some pretty messed up things.

Denzel Washington – The Tragedy of Macbeth: Denzel Washington is no stranger to Shakespeare; he’s done prominent Shakespeare work on and off Broadway and also had a notable role in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, but he’s never quite been able to display his command of iambic pentameter in a major starring film role like this before. Washington’s take on the character is to make Macbeth into an older lord who stages his coup out of a sort of impulsive resentment and then later falls into a sort of deranged cynicism and kind of underplays a lot of the late speeches rather than turning up the volume.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Yes I can echo that. Rex is the right choice here.

This is a tough one, but like your disclaimer mentions it shouldn't be about notable faces but the performances themselves.

I probably would've gone with Dune, but I'm biased in that regard and there's no doubt that the entire cast of West Side Story was superb.

Best Line of Dialogue
Okay, this goofy category that I routinely screw up. This is something I frequently over-think or under-think and end up missing some pretty iconic lines. As of late I’ve almost quit on coming up with short quips and have moved towards nominating long-ish speeches but I think this year I’m going to move away from that band back towards shorter and more quotable lines.

“Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” - The French Dispatch: The French Dispatch is ostensibly meant to be an obituary for the Bill Murray character, who is the beloved editor of the titular paper. We do not, however, see a whole lot of him until late in the third story where he helps out a struggling writer and delivers this line that we’d heard earlier was a motto of his. In context it gives you a very good idea of why this editor is so well liked: he supported his writers financially and otherwise and sympathized with them even when they were perhaps a bit lost.

“Father, Son, House of Gucci” – House of Gucci: This line, which rather memorably capped every trailer for the film House of Gucci is almost like an encapsulation of the movie as a whole in that it’s kind of ridiculous but it’s rather amusing just the same. The line is not present in the film’s screenplay and was apparently an ad-lib on Lady Gaga’s part. It of course implies that this lady is so fanatically loyal to the titular fashion house that she replaces the holy spirit in her sign of the cross… except this is employed in a scene where she is very much lying to the Jared Leto character so maybe this little oath and the loyalty it implies is less than meets the eye.

“I knew that was what you were thinking, you’re always thinking things you thinker! You Thinker! You think things!” - Licorice Pizza: This line in Licorice Pizza comes during an argument between the Alana Haim character and her family after a boy she brings home kind of makes an ass of himself. Alana storms back into the house yelling at her father, then when her sister gives her a look she doesn’t like she starts yelling at her accusing her of thinking various condescending things leading up to this silly little statement that kind of underscores the character’s general immaturity. The fact that these are Alana Haim’s actual family/bandmates in this scene just give the whole thing an extra charge.

Nightmare Alley -

“We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.” – Pig: This line comes toward the end of a highlight scene from Pig in which Nicholas Cage’s character confronts a former employee who runs a restaurant that is like a parody of some of the more pretentious tropes of modern foodie culture. The Cage character pulls from this restaurateur that what he really wanted to do was open a pub, but that he basically sold out to chase trends. The Cage character, clearly drawing from his own feelings of loss, gives him a lesson in what it means to focus on what really matters to you ending on this line, which perhaps helps to explain why he himself is so driven to find this pig.

And the Golden Stake goes to…