[jquery] Showing loading animation in center of page while making a call to Action method in ASP .NET MVC

You can do this by displaying a div (if you want to do it in a modal manner you could use blockUI - or one of the many other modal dialog plugins out there) prior to the request then just waiting until the call back succeeds as a quick example you can you $.getJSON as follows (you might want to use .ajax if you want to add proper error handling)

$("#ajaxLoader").show(); //Or whatever you want to do
$.getJSON("/AJson/Call/ThatTakes/Ages", function(result) {
    //Process your response
    $("#ajaxLoader").hide();
});

If you do this several times in your app and want to centralise the behaviour for all ajax calls you can make use of the global AJAX events:-

$("#ajaxLoader").ajaxStart(function() { $(this).show(); })
               .ajaxStop(function() { $(this).hide(); });

Using blockUI is similar for example with mark up like:-

<a href="/Path/ToYourJson/Action" id="jsonLink">Get JSON</a>
<div id="resultContainer" style="display:none">
And the answer is:-
    <p id="result"></p>
</div>

<div id="ajaxLoader" style="display:none">
    <h2>Please wait</h2>
    <p>I'm getting my AJAX on!</p>
</div>

And using jQuery:-

$(function() {
    $("#jsonLink").click(function(e) {
        $.post(this.href, function(result) {
            $("#resultContainer").fadeIn();
            $("#result").text(result.Answer);
        }, "json");
        return false;
    });
    $("#ajaxLoader").ajaxStart(function() {
                          $.blockUI({ message: $("#ajaxLoader") });
                     })
                    .ajaxStop(function() { 
                          $.unblockUI();
                     });
});