PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Cate Blanchett - I'm Not There
Ruby Dee - American Gangster
Saoirse Ronan - Atonement
Amy Ryan - Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton - Michael Clayton
Are you picking who you think should win or will win? I'd have a problem with this selection if it comes about. She was One-Note Wilma for the entire movie, for a character I felt required a great deal more subtlety. How does such a shaky, nerve-wrecked woman come to be chief counsel of a multi-billion-dollar multi-national corporation? To me, she needed to either play this like a hungry tigress on the hunt or at the very least put up one convincing facade around her corporate peers and superiors. I got neither. Instead we got deer-in-the-headlights from start to finish. It was one of the reasons I felt the movie didn't deliver the goods -- the only menace we got was from Wilkinson's character whom I think we were supposed to be rooting for. I think this is why so much of the audience left bewildered as to what they saw.
Thumbs down to this choice.