2014 Muriel Awards: Best Body of Work

In each of the last two years, the winner in this category has been the same - Matthew McConaughey. But this year, the actor formerly known as Wooderson has decided to give some other people a chance (the fact that True Detective doesn't qualify here had something to do with that) and the results were rather more, well, feminine. As you'll soon see, this was a close race, and I think any of our top three finishers would have been worthy recipients of this award.

Third place:

Scarlett Johansson [actor – Under the Skin, Lucy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier] (142 points / 23 votes)

Second place:

Tilda Swinton [actor – Snowpiercer, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Zero Theorem] (146 points / 23 votes)

And the Muriel Award goes to...

Marion Cotillard [actor – Two Days, One Night, The Immigrant] (151 points / 23 votes)

“While I can’t speak for my fellow voters, one of the things I was most struck by when preparing my ballot was how deep the bench of great female performances was this year. Narrowing Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress down to five choices was an extremely difficult task, made harder by the fact that multiple actress each did great work in multiple films. Any of these women— Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Elisabeth Moss— would have been a respectable choice for our Body of Work prize. Even among this strong field, though, one actress stood out above the others: Marion Cotillard, who gave two of the year’s best performances in two of the year’s best films. (She was also hilarious in this, which turned out to be ineligible for an award on account of the bullshit technicality that it’s 'not a movie.')

“What makes Cotillard’s achievement so remarkable is not just that she did outstanding work in two films, but that she did so in such disparate performance styles. While Two Days, One Night and The Immigrant could both be described as melodramas of a sort, they are quite different in style and affect. Two Days, One Night is a Dardenne brothers film to the core, naturalistic and unadorned and stylistically just pretty much as far removed as possible from The Immigrant’s old-Hollywood romanticism. And yet Cotillard fits so naturally in each film, and is so central to their emotional impacts, that it’s impossible to imagine either without her. Cotillard’s performance in Two Days, One Night is a work of startling emotional clarity, discarding any actorly mannerisms in favor of a direct, fully realized expression of her character’s complex inner life. (It’s one of the most convincing portrayals of depression I’ve ever seen.) In contrast, her work in James Gray’s The Immigrant pairs a silent-film star’s poise with a method actor’s emotional intensity; it’s more stylized than her work in Two Days, One Night but no less devastating. Together, the two performances confirm that Cotillard is one of the few current actors who could have done brilliant work in any era of film history. It’s just our good fortune that she happens to be working now." ~ Matt Noller

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