MOVIES: Best of 2010 -- Supporting Actress

The runners-up:

• Ann Guilbert, Please Give
• Rosamund Pike, Barney's Version
• Kerry Washington, Mother and Child
• Mia Wasikowska, The Kids Are All Right
• Dianne Wiest, Rabbit Hole

The nominees:

• Dale Dickey, Winter's Bone -- The matriarch who rules with an iron fist, protecting her husband by enforcing his privacy, and more aware than anyone of what a bleak world her young cousin is entering.
• Kimberly Elise, For Colored Girls -- She's handed the movie's most difficult material, forced to react to the most cartoonishly evil act, and makes the moment so heartbreakingly real that you shrink in your seat, not so much from the horror of what's been done but from the intensity of her pain.
• Lesley Manville, Another Year -- Alternating between denial and despair, sometimes in the same breath, Manville's every emotion is instantly readable, and provides the backdrop against we recognize the willful oblivion of her friends.
• Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom -- Grandma Smurf may not be the one pulling the trigger, but she's the most vicious member of her family, and that loving smile becomes awfully icy by the time the movie ends.

And the winner:

• Olivia Williams, The Ghost Writer -- Ruth's simmering anger and resentment run so deep that it's a bit shocking when we realize just how many of the strings she's been pulling. It's a ferocious portrayal of a woman who feels that all of her hard work has been betrayed.