Emma Thompson in "Stranger Than Fiction"

THIS IS PART OF THE CLASS OF '06 - SUPPORTING ACTRESS BLOGATHON, click here for the entire thing.

Stranger Than Fiction is a brilliant and breathtaking film. A contemporary masterpiece, if you will. It is directed by Marc Forster, who also directed Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland, making him one of the most critically mixed directors of the last 20 years. Especially Stay, which wasted the talents of Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, and likely Best Actor nominee this year Ryan Gosling.

But this one, this one is different. It stars Will Ferrell as Harold Crick, your average, run-of-the-mill IRS agent. One day, he's brushing his teeth, and he hears a voice. A voice categorizing all his thoughts, actions, and words with a better vocabulary and enunciation. The voice is the most important thing in the film, since, as time moves along, it reveals to Harold that he partaking in a series of events that will leave to imminent death.

Harold, of course, freaks out and becomes as paranoid as you can get in a PG-13 rated movie. He's only human. And he's going to die. Wouldn't that freak you out? But the voice. The voice drives the film. The voice brings Harold to the brink of insanity. The thing is: she doesn't even know she's doing anything.

The voice is of Karen Eiffel's, played undeniably excellently by Emma Thompson. She brings the film in and she brings the film up. Without her, the film is nothing, obviously. Karen is a chain smoking, ratty-looking, delusional novelist who is famous for creatively killing off her main characters. She hasn't written a book in ten years, and her publishers are worried. So they send Queen Latifah. She almost seems like a character only Karen can see that is there, then isn't, you know what I mean? But she only adds more opportunity to Emma's greatness that she doesn't take for granted.

Her performance is brilliant throughout the film, but gets even greater and on an epic level when Harold contacts her. She freaks out the only way an Oscar-winner knows how: throwing things. She is in a state of moral dilemma, since the character she must kill is flesh and bone. Harold eventually is able to accept his death, but Karen isn't. The morality issues are undeniable and she doesn't know what to do. But she does it. On her Inter-dimensional Kaufmanesque Typewriter, she typed, word by word, Harold's doom. When she finishes, she pushes the typewriter off the single table in the large white room. In tears, she proves that she is a great actress. She proves that you need makeup and glamour to be good. She proves that looking like a man without trying can be effective. She proves the excellence of the film. Harold may be the main character, but Karen has more emotional resonance and importance to the sequence of events.

She deserves any award given. But does not even receive a Golden Globe nomination. The eyes of the organizations are blind. Stranger Than Fiction's only nomination was Will Ferrell. WTF? He was good, but certainly not the best performance. Come on, you all know Emma was nod-worthy. But who cares what they think in their ivory towers? As sappy as it is, what matters to you is what you think. And I think Emma Thompsons gave one of the Best Performances of the year.