Welcome to the 2025 SiftPop.com Sifties!
This year, the SiftPop writers came together to nominate five performances for Best Voice or Motion Capture Performance. This is a category that is woefully underrepresented at awards shows, so we sought to remedy that!
Here’s how the voting played out:
If there were an award for Most Delightful Performance of the year, Ben Whishaw’s work as Paddington would be an automatic win for every new Paddington film. Paddington in Peru may be the obvious weakest of the three films, but Whishaw’s voice performance remains no less wonderful. His soft-spoken sweetness and unapologetically wholesome view of the world would be enough to make even the chilliest corners of the earth melt. It is Whishaw’s voice work that completely convinces you of Paddington’s inherent goodness as a character, as well as his belief in the inherent goodness of others. It is difficult not to be moved by the compassion and wide-eyed enthusiasm for life of Paddington.
It’s always cool when the MCU takes genuinely good actors and places them in roles where they would fit perfectly. Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing is one such example. Known for his role on The Bear, Moss-Bachrach brings his tough-guy charm to The Fantastic 4: First Steps, and has good chemistry with everyone he shares a scene with. Despite this being a motion capture performance, his energy as a performer still comes through, as a true testament to his ability to craft a character.
Each character in KPop Demon Hunters has two sides: the speaking side and the singing side. While the singing voices of Huntrix and the Saja Boys are getting rightfully praised, not enough credit is being given to the speaking voices for bringing these characters to life. Arden Cho, in particular, is amazing as the speaking voice of Rumi. She breathes life into Rumi, whose larger-than-life singing voice makes a darker sense of self with a drive to do whatever it takes at the expense of all the other people around her. Throughout the course of the movie, Cho helps show that Rumi cares deeply about her friends and fellow band members, but she can’t be her true self until the Hunmoon is sealed for good. Yet, Cho can make the funny moments have you slapping your knees with laughter and the sad moments make you sob. You can feel Cho’s passion for her culture with her performance and it shows how much it means to her to bring Rumi to life.
Zoe Saldaña has been the true heart of the Avatar franchise for three movies now. She was the native whose home was being threatened in the original, a mom who just wants to protect her family in The Way of Water, and is now a person struggling with assimilation and her own identity. Saldaña is fierce, loving, angry, joyful, and conflicted all throughout the course of the movie, running the gamut of everything that makes a great performance.
To even the biggest fans of the Avatar franchise, the characters aren’t the reason James Cameron keeps getting richer, and each movie makes a smooth billion easy. However, that all changed with the introduction of Varang, portrayed brilliantly by Oona Chaplin. Hey, Chaplin, that sounds familiar… Anyway, what Oona does with Varang is so great that you start missing her when the movie shifts in the third act, because from her introduction, she’s menacing, tall, dangerous, and hot, and that’s before she and her clan get their hands on human weapons and technology.
Make sure to check out the previous 2025 Sifties winners, and check back tomorrow for the winner of Best Film Ensemble!