Two-minute Oscars

Nice to report that discovering ephemeral, indelible performances---a fixture in the pages of Interview since 1992--was easier in 2007. Please celebrate moments of true shock and awe from these great, selfless artists:

1 Tereza Srbova, who has an air of infinite sadness even more haunting than her beauty as the Ukrainian sex slave that Viggo Mortensen's character is ordered to bed down in Eastern Promises.

2 Lynne Redgrave, who's the worst mother ever in The Jane Austen Book Club: an alcoholic nutter, a fire hazard as a cook, and a living example of why marriage makes her daughter Prudie anxious.

3 Robert Downey Jr., in Lucky You, who unflappably runs a half-dozen "help" lines at once (legal, psychological, financial) using cell phones from his perch at a sunny Las Vegas bar.

4 Clarence Williams III as Bumpy, the crime boss and mentor in American Gangster who manages to convey a lifetime of rage and bewilderment with a single slump of his elegantly tailored shoulder.

5 Rosemary Harris as the terrified jewelry store clerk in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, whose use of a gun to protect "someone else's" property is inexplicable until we learn her full deadly family story.

6 Margo Martindale, in Feast of Love, as a psychic suffused with empathy for the anxious young woman before her and reluctant to reveal the tragedy she reads in her cards.

7 Nasser Memarzia, as the orphanage director in The Kite Runner, who defends his monstrous bargain with the Taliban by arguing that prostituting a few pitiful children to them lets him keep the crumbling orphanage open for others.

8 Vanessa Redgrave in Atonement, as younger sister Briony at the end of her life faces a TV interviewer and turns soul-deep regret into the purest, most crystalline summation of a writer's--and an actor's--art.

9 Zoe Kazan as the frantic young wife of a returned Iraq war soldier in In the Valley of Elah, pleading with detective Charlize Theron for police intervention as her husband's rages increase and the VA won't help.

10 Gene Jones, in No Country for Old Men, as the owner of a ratty desert gas station, increasingly anxious and bewildered by Javier Bardem's banal, oddly threatening question: "What's the most you've ever lost in a coin toss?"

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