5. Lady Gaga as Ally in “A Star is Born”
It’s always a joy to watch some deserving but downtrodden nobody get plucked from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight, as happens in Bradley Cooper’s “A Star is Born,” Frank Pierce’s “A Star is Born,” George Cukor’s “A Star is Born” and William Wellman’s “A Star is Born.” This time out, the trembling ingenue, destined for fame despite her humble background is [checks notes] the seventh-biggest-selling solo female pop star of all time, Lady Gaga. Seriously, though, Gaga’s first leading performance, playing hotel waitress and part-time singer Ally is absurdly convincing, considering how long it’s been since she was anything but a superstar. Indeed, arguably she’s actually better, and certainly more touchingly real, in the first half of Cooper’s film, before her first brush with fame turns her into something a lot closer to…Lady Gaga. Prior to “A Star is Born,” which has just this morning netted Gaga her first ever Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress and is likely to do her the same favor at the Oscars, the artist formerly known as Stefani Germanotta did have a season arc on “American Horror Story,” but other than that her acting slate is surprisingly empty. And now we have to wonder what project will be big enough for her to take on next? Maybe she’s just going to have to go full Streisand and launch her own directing career before settling down to clone her dogs. The sky is basically the limit.
4. Awkwafina as Peik Lin Goh “Crazy Rich Asians”
Rapper-turned-actress Awkwafina is basically the Tiffany Haddish of 2018, in that her embodiment of the most outrageous role in the comedy hit of the year cemented her breakout status. She basically runs off with the show as the zanily-dressed, bottle-blond force of nature Peik Lin, college buddy of Constance Wu’s romantic lead in Jon M Chu’s phenomenally successful “Crazy Rich Asians” turning in, aside from Michelle Yeoh‘s frosty tiger mom,the film’s most memorable character by quite some distance. Indeed, while the plot of ‘Asians’ is actually pretty formulaic, it is her anarchic energy that gives it the most life, while one of the bright spots of the glossy but rather disappointing “Oceans 8” was seeing her more than hold her own as the street-smart pickpocket Constance, in the company of heavyweights like Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock. But good news for fans of her particularly spiky and off-kilter charisma, her dance card is filling up rapidly. She’s slated to star alongside Emma Roberts in fantasy film “Paradise Hills”; has been cast in the Jordan Peele-scripted comedy sci-fi series “Weird City” and perhaps most gratifyingly, it has also just been announced that the Tiffany Haddish of 2018 is due to star in the upcoming “21 Jump Street” reboot thing alongside the Tiffany Haddish of 2017, Tiffany Haddish.
3. Thomasin McKenzie as Tom in “Leave No Trace”
The last time Debra Granik took an unknown young actress and put her in a stark, lyrically realist story of sacrifice and survival in a harsh environment, she launched the career of Oscar-winning megastar Jennifer Lawrence. If we hadn’t seen “Leave No Trace” we might think that lightning was unlikely to strike twice, but dammit if New Zealander McKenzie’s perfectly modulated turn isn’t in every way the equal of Lawrence’s in “Winter’s Bone.” A beautiful and mournfully quiet film about the heartbreaking truth that there are some cases when truly loving somebody means understanding they’re better off without you, it centers on a performance from McKenzie that is a naturalistic wonder, from the practiced way she lights a fire in their forest home, to the effortless, non-verbal communication between her and her war veteran father (a brilliant Ben Foster). But if 2018 was big for McKenzie, 2019 is going to be gargantuan — she currently has four projects in post, each bigger than the last. There’s Netflix mystery movie “Lost Girls” from Liz Garbus, alongside Amy Ryan, Gabriel Byrne and Lola Kirke; Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit” with Scarlett Johansson, Rebel Wilson and Sam Rockwell; Jed Kurzel’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s booker-winning “The True History of the Kelly Gang” with Russell Crowe, Nicholas Hoult and Charlie Hunnam; and David Michod‘s enormously ambitious “The King,” with Ben Mendelsohn and 2017 Breakout List alum Timothée Chalamet. Settle in, McKenzie’s here for the long haul.
2. Steven Yeun as Ben in “Burning”
Korean-American actor Steven Yeun was doing just fine before “Burning” came along. After six years on “The Walking Dead” and innumerable small bit parts and voice acting roles, his career was moving along swiftly. But though his relatively veteran status might seem to put him outside this list’s remit, his performance in the pivotal and extremely difficult, chimeric role of Ben in Lee Chang-dong‘s latest masterpiece, “Burning” has simply placed him in an entirely new category. Yeun persuasively embodies the detached, alien air of privilege that seeds such resentment in his love rival Lee Jong-su (played by Yoo Ah-in who might just make it onto another list soon) — if Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-so, another startling newcomer) is the object of Jong-su’s affection, Ben becomes the object of his obsessive fixation. Not only does Yeun play both the attractive and repulsive qualities of his character without ever breaking a sweat, he can even do it while yawning: the scene in which he glances over, bored and conspiratorial, at Jong-su and does a delicate little cat-yawn is, very possibly, the greatest single performance moment of 2018. He also showed up in a small role in “Sorry to Bother You,” and has the fun-sounding comic adaptation “Chew” with David Tennant, lined up, but really “Burning” is the rare breakout performance that will just keep on giving with each repeat viewing, perfectly mysterious, completely sure-footed and, ultimately even rather tragic, so we might just keep watching it instead.
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1. Amandla Stenberg as Starr Carter in “The Hate U Give”
For an actress only 20 years old last in October, Amandla Stenberg has had more than a few dramatic brushes with controversy. Indeed the first time she came to our notice was as the subject of the brief, nasty racist reaction to her casting as Rue in “The Hunger Games.” Since then she has worked consistently, with 2017’s romance “Everything Everything” her most prominent lead to that date, but has also been politically outspoken about intersectional feminism and her own gender identity and sexuality. It seemed, for a while, unlikely she’d find any role that could even come close to channeling that complex, unapologetic off-screen energy. But in George Tillman Jr‘s “The Hate U Give,” an adaptation of the YA novel by Angie Thomas, that role finally came — the film is a scorching, unsubtle but provocative look at a community divided by the killing of an unarmed black teenager, but it is also a coming-of-age drama with genuinely funny moments observing the absurdities of modern racial discourse and code-switching. And Stenberg simply owns it, from the beginning, emitting the kind of high-wattage, dazzling charisma that simply becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’ve seen “The Hate U Give” (and you should, it’s really good) there is no doubt that, with all due respect to the rebirth of Gaga, in Stenberg, a star is born.
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–with Oliver Lyttelton & Kevin Jagernauth
Click here for our complete coverage of the best and worst of 2018.
