The 2018 ComicBook.com Golden Issue Award for Best Actress

As we near the end of 2018, awards season begins to ramp up, and with that, another iteration of ComicBook.com's Golden Issue Awards.

In an effort to celebrate the best of content released in the past 12 months, the ComicBook.com came together to determine the favorites across all platforms of entertainment including movies, anime, games, television, and comic books.

Whether they were confronting otherworldly horrors or attempting to save our planet, this year's nominees for Best Actress had to demonstrate not only their emotional vulnerabilities, but also their physical capabilities in the face of certain death. One actress ultimately stood out for her impressive range of emotions, setting herself apart from the formidable competition.

And the winner of Best Actress is...

Emily Blunt, for her role as Evelyn Abbot in A Quiet Place!

Blunt has offered audiences countless compelling performances since her breakout role in The Devil Wears Prada, though she has only scratched the surface of the horror genre, with her role as Evelyn in A Quiet Place establishing herself as a powerful presence even when having to share the screen with horrific monsters.

In the horror film, Blunt played the matriarch of a family surviving in a world full of beasts who possessed heightened hearing, allowing them to attack and kill any beings that made a sound. Not willing to just lay down and die, Evelyn and her family found ways to survive in such a terrifying world, adopting a life of near-silence to endure.

What makes Blunt's performance in the film so satisfying is the wealth of emotions she manages to convey without the use of speech. Her family instead used sign language to communicate, forcing Blunt and the rest of the cast to rely more on body language to express their motivations. From an almost-silent slow dance with her husband to her struggles when faced with the pain of labor, Blunt emoted more effectively than other performers could while using their voice to explicitly describe what they were going through.

If the mayhem Evelyn encountered throughout the film wasn't enough reason for Blunt to take home the top honors of the year, Blunt's face in the film's final shot managed to convey a feeling that the audience had been overcome by, allowing the film to not only end with satisfaction, but also filling us with elation over the possibility of seeing Evelyn in a future film.

List of Nominees:

• Emily Blunt as Evelyn Abbott - A Quiet Place [WINNER]
• Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne - Ant-Man and the Wasp
• Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode - Halloween
• Natalie Portman as Lena - Annihilation
• Zoe Saldana as Gamora - Avengers: Infinity War