“Milk” has topped the New York Film Critics Circle Awards list having won Best Picture and Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn and Josh Brolin respectively.
Shut out of the director’s prize was “Milk” filmmaker Gus Van Sant. Instead, that honor went to Mike Leigh for his excellent British dramedy, “Happy Go Lucky” which was given also given the Best Actress award for the film’s winning lead Sally Hawkins. We’re glad to see ‘Lucky’ finally got some major award season love.
We’re also incredibly happy to see “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” taking the Foreign Best Picture Award. A hint: we started making our preliminary Top 10 list and this Romanian wonder was way up there. It’s kind of been forgotten since it came out in February in the U.S. “Man On Wire” nabbed Best Documentary and if you’re following the pre-Oscar award season so far it feels like a lock for a win for Oscar’s Best Documentary, but that category can also be tricky to predict sometimes.
If you want some perspective, last year the LAFCA (the Los Angeles Film Critics Association) voted “There Will Be Blood” and Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Picture and Best Director and neither of those won Oscar (but yes, they were nominated). The NYFCC gave Best Picture and Best Director to “No Country For Old Men” and the Coen Brothers and you know what happened there. So this awards list is possibly a stronger bellwether of things to come. The LAFCA just gave Best Picture to “Wall-E” yesterday and us and a few others rolled their eyes while some jumped for joy and naively thought this meant Oscar.
NYFCC final awards list:
Best Actress
Sally Hawkins – “Happy-Go-Lucky”
Best Screenplay
Jenny Lumet – “Rachel Getting Married”
Best Cinematographer
Anthony Dod Mantle – “Slumdog Millionaire”
Best Supporting Actor
Josh Brolin- “Milk”
Best Animated Film
“WALL-E”
Best Director
Mike Leigh “Happy-Go-Lucky”
Best First Film
Courtney Hunt – “Frozen River”
Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz – “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”
Best Foreign Film
“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”
Best Actor
Sean Penn – “Milk”
Best Documentary
“Man on Wire”
Best Picture
“Milk”
The members in the NYFCC are a very respectable group of people. Film criticism is dying so getting a real job in the field is almost impossible these days, but we’d be lying if we didn’t say we’d love to be part of that group. Then again, criticism is the field of reviewers and real reviews are something we find kind of tedious to write these days. Either way, they’re distinguished and people listen to what they have to say perhaps more than any other film critics in the U.S. (the major L.A. ones we’d go to bat for are Scott Foundas and Kenneth Turan).
The big snub has to be seen as Heath Ledger being overlooked for his Joker turn. It’s got some of the ‘Dark Knight’ fans up in arms and while we’re not ‘TDK’ obsessives in the least if you had to ask us which performance was more jaw-dropping we’d have to side with Ledger. Is this a sign that “The Dark Knight” isn’t going to be taken seriously come Oscar time?