Our picks for some of the year's best performances
More best of 2014
Best performance by an actor: Eddie Redmayne for his transparent portrait of scientist Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.”
Best performance by an actress: Essie Davis as a widowed young mother slowly losing control of her son and mental faculties to the horrific “The Babadook.”
Best supporting performance by an actor: J.K. Simmons as the obsessively controlling jazz band conductor in “Whiplash.”
Best supporting performance by an actress: Laura Dern as the loving, dying mother in “Wild.”
Best director: Richard Linklater for his visionary work “Boyhood”
Best cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki for his challenging, lengthy, handheld tracking shots in “Birdman.”
Best score: Mica Levi for the ultra-weird and otherworldly music to “Under the Skin”
Best editing: Tom Cross for his precision pacing in “Whiplash.”
Best Production Design: The elegantly stylish visuals in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
Best original screenplay: “Birdman” by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo.
Best Adapted Screenplay: “The Imitation Game” by Graham Moore.
Missing from movies?
As I wrote up my top movies of 2014, I noticed that only two of them were directed by women: “The Babadook” (Jennifer Kent) and “Citizenfour” (Laura Poitras). (Angelina Jolie's “Unbroken” didn't make the cut.)
I also noticed that none of my top 14 offered stories about minority experiences or even possessed a major minority presence in the cast. (Ava DuVernay's “Selma” almost made the cut. It opens here Jan. 9.)
This is quite different from last year's top movies, headed by “12 Years a Slave,” Steve McQueen's historical drama based on the memoirs of a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War South.
So, as we celebrate the best of this year's movies, here's hoping for a 2015 filled with more opportunities and diversity in the mainstream movie-making community.
• Dann Gire's Reel Life column runs Fridays in the Daily Herald.