They call the annual parade of prizes for art “award season.” It lasts for months and reliably culminates in somebody standing on a stage saying “thank you” (or sometimes “no thank you”). Meanwhile, we at home might understand that we’re looking at a winner, but almost never do we know why they’ve won. Lots of hardware, no citation. So, since its inception, The New York Times Magazine’s Great Performers issue has tried to be enlightening about what makes certain good acting stand out.

This year, we went in a different, deeper, slightly weirder direction by identifying a specific aspect of a piece of acting (a gesture, a facial expression, a back; how good somebody’s performance was in a car, on a phone, in a group). On its own, that one element might be a singular achievement, but it also helps explain why the rest of a performance is so impossible to forget.

Here are some highlights.

Best Acting Above the Nose: Paul Giamatti, “The Holdovers”

If a middle-aged actor has ignored the call to seek facial rejuvenation — if his entire face still works — special attention will be paid. Even then, who but Giamatti could use his face to travel from indignity to indignation with a mere narrowing of the eyes, from resting to rage? Paul Hunham, the fallen prep-school teacher he plays in “The Holdovers,” slouches his way through the film, his quiver stocked with embitterment and tweedy hauteur. The movie puts Hunham’s distasteful, explosive qualities to moral, altruistic ends, and you can measure the emotional magnitude of his righteousness by the creases, lines and squiggles that striate Giamatti’s forehead. What he’s after is richer than plain fury. Yes, he can give you Vesuvius. But here, in the most deeply inhabited, most sharply etched use to which that brow has yet been put, Giamatti has also located Lake Placid and charts a course toward it.

Best Acting on a Landline: Matt Damon, Viola Davis and Chris Messina, “Air”

The kick of a memorable phone sequence comes from the pleasure an actor has obviously found in the yakking. “Air” is set in 1984, when the landline still ruled telecom. Damon spends the movie neck-cradling a handset and, if Messina is howling at him on the other end, holding it at a comical distance and grimacing. Messina is playing Michael Jordan’s ulcerous agent; Damon’s character works for Nike. Messina screams into his phone’s transmitter as if Damon were trapped deep inside. When Damon is on the phone with Davis (playing Jordan’s mother), he holds it very close to his head, as if her voice were pain relief. Davis’s grip implies delicacy and, because every phone call in “Air” is a negotiation, full commitment to the firmness of her terms.

Best Gonzo Performance: Emma Stone, “Poor Things”

It doesn’t feel good saluting actors for courage. Courage is the whole job. But if you’re playing an adult corpse and the corpse is reanimated with the brain of an infant and the reanimated, baby-brained corpse has to not only learn to remain upright, grip objects, feed itself and speak but also find a way of conveying to an audience the development of those faculties — in gradients! — well … then you are still only in acting class. However, if you’re Emma Stone doing corpse work, the technique required to go from lumpen to living gets a magic wand’s ting. And still the movie needs you to apply a comedian’s sensibility — to every step, flub, bite and orgasm. On your way from savant to simpleton to sophisticate, you have to make every thought, every experience feel like an epiphany. You have to be ravished. Yet you have to ravish us. And you’ve got to have the courage — yes, there it is, the courage — to look ridiculous, powerfully ridiculous, as ravishment is achieved, to repossess it. And Emma Stone, you do. “Ridiculous” is yours now.

Best Theft of a Movie: Ryan Gosling, “Barbie”

For an audience to leave a movie theater convinced that one actor has pocketed the film implies that something went wrong, that a movie that wasn’t about that character became about the actor playing that character. Famously: Anthony Hopkins and his almost 25 minutes of screen time in “The Silence of the Lambs.” And now: Gosling — controversially, for stealing candy from a Barbie. He goes so hard at the joke that Ken is supposed to be telling on men: Strength is weakness, coolness is lame, knowledge is ignorance, twinkle is shadow. You watch Gosling’s face for some sign of a wink, but he is committed. He could have played Ken as an idiot. But the comedy of the performance, the danger of the part and perhaps the point of the movie is that the actor playing this narcissist has installed in him a soul.