MOVIES: Best of 2012 - Supporting Actor

This was a category with an unusually large amount of good comic work this year. Comic performances never get the recognition they deserve.

The runners-up:

• Armie Hammer, Mirror Mirror
• Tom Holland, The Impossible
• Fran Kranz, The Cabin in the Woods
• Scoot McNairy, Argo
• Michael Shannon, Premium Rush

The nominees:

• Jim Broadbent, Cloud Atlas -- Whether he's playing the comedy of the nursing home story or the vicious cruelty of the composer story, he's always riveting and always entertaining.
• Tom Cruise, Rock of Ages -- Playing a man clinging desperately to his own celebrity, Cruise gives a limber performance of surprising grace and wit.
• Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln -- It's very hard to play this sort of moral fortitude in our age of cynical snark, but Jones's righteous determination always feels sincere and justified.
• Christopher Walken, Seven Psychopaths -- Walken as the sanest person in the movie isn't something you expect, but it works. Whether he's stubbornly refusing to indulge his grief, or wandering the desert on a peyote trip, Walken gets every conceivable laugh from his material.

And the winner:

• Samuel L. Jackson, Django Unchained -- Jackson's performance would be admirable if only for his ferocious commitment to such a loathesome character. But Jackson also makes clear the vicious self-loathing that's tearing at him with every obsequious laugh, and the razor-sharp intelligence he's never been allowed to show. It's spectuacularly good work.