Welcome to the 2022 SiftPop.com Sifties!
This year, the SiftPop writers came together to nominate five performances for Best Performance. Unlike the Oscars and other major awards shows, we didn’t differentiate between lead and supporting performances or between actors and actresses. This is simply a countdown of the five best performances that we collectively saw!
2022 was another year of great performances at the movies. Between breakup movies, multiverse epics, stories about great composers, or about appreciating people even with their differences, there was a wide variety to appreciate. The SiftPop crew nominated five performers for Best Performance: Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Brendan Fraser in The Whale, Cate Blanchett in Tár, and Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin. Here’s how the voting played out:
It’s not easy to portray a transition from naive innocence to jaded disillusionment, but Colin Farrell pulls it off perfectly in The Banshees of Inisherin. Whether it’s his opening carefree scene, his speech about being nice, having as much chemistry with donkeys and dogs as he does with humans, or missing his sister, Farrell’s turn as Pádraic is incredibly moving and sympathetic. Farrell had a massive year on the screen between Banshees, The Batman, After Yang, and Thirteen Lives, and he’s great in all four of those films. But Pádraic just stands out among the rest as a naturally human performance.
Despite having a largely successful career, in a way it feels like this is just the beginning for Michelle Yeoh. With previous credits including being a Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies, a lead in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and a host of other varied films including Memoirs of Geisha, Crazy Rich Asians, Last Christmas, Kung Fu Panda 2, and Shang-Chi, that feels like a ridiculous statement to make. But if you look at her upcoming filmography, she’s scheduled for the new Transformers film, the long-awaited adaptation of Wicked, and several of the Avatar sequels. Playing the lead in Everything Everywhere All at Once, and playing a wide variety of them, Yeoh puts on one of the best performances of the year in what feels like a game-changing move. With the success of this film in large part due to her performance, it seems like she isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and we are thrilled about that!
Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale may have been met with a complicated critical reception, but you would be hard-pressed to find a review that doesn’t praise the magnificent work of Brendan Fraser. The role of Charlie is both physically demanding and filled with layers of emotional nuance. Playwright and screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter asks his protagonist to look inward and reckon with the sins of his past, all while maintaining a genuine sense of optimism and a love for truth and vulnerability. Fraser can tell an entire story with his eyes, and his soft-spoken, heartfelt line-readings pour over with such earnest emotion that it is difficult not to be moved. Fraser deserves every accolade and expression of love that comes his way and then some for his powerful performance in The Whale.
Cate Blanchett has been one of the best performers in film for decades, and she’s proving it once again with her tremendous work in Tár. What makes this role so compelling is how much Blanchett is able to play with your expectations. The character evolves as the film progresses, changing from a respectable and esteemed music conductor, to a repugnant individual running away with her tail between her legs. There’s expressions of pride, vanity, jealousy, fear, anger, boredom, and anguish that are lushly explored and powerfully commanded. It’s no wonder Blanchett’s performance is considered one of the best of the year, because she owns every second that she’s one screen, and Tár is her movie from beginning to end.
After being largely absent since 1992 from film and TV, seeing the actor who played Short Round and Data all grown up brought a huge smile to film fans in theaters everywhere. And while Ke Huy Quan does still share some of the attributes we mostly associate with those characters, it is clear that he is much more than that now. Quan is still a delight to watch when he is in that mindset, but he also leads some of the most emotional moments in the entirety of Everything Everywhere All at Once. In a film that has both a nihilistic and positive outlook on life, it takes a special charm for an actor to mostly carry the positivity, but Quan does so easily. He has been nominated and won many awards this season and is absolutely deserving of each one.
Make sure to check out the previous 2022 Sifties winners, and don’t forget to check back tomorrow for the winner of Best Movie! You can also listen to the SiftPop writers’ top five movies of the year on the SiftPop Writers’ Room Podcast!