ofcs Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Last-ish but not least-ish so far as awarding year-end, um, awards goes, the Online Film Critics Society has decided to honor Wall-E with its top prize, not to mention Best Original Screenplay and Best Animated Feature.

Numbers-wise, The Dark Knight and Let the Right One In co-dominated with four awards each. Christopher Nolan took home Best Director for the former, which also won Best Supporting Actor for Heath Ledger's performance, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score. The latter won Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Film, and both Breakthrough awards -- for director Tomas Alfredson and young actress Lina Leandersson.

It was then The Wrestler with two wins (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress), and one awards each for Wendy and Lucy (Best Actress), Man on Wire (Best Documentary), and Slumdog Millionaire (Best Editing). Truth be told, I'm kind of glad to see the love spread around, although I say that with an already established fondness for most of these films, and even if I wasn't the biggest fan of Wendy and Lucy, I can admit that it got just the award it deserves.

The OFCS? What the heck is that? Why should I care about what they say? The Online Film Critics Society? So, like, all the rabid commenters from Amazon, Moviefone, and the IMDb get together and pick their favorite movies? Is that how it works? Well, no. And I can poke a little fun because I've been a proud member of the OFCS for the better part of a decade now. But according to our by-laws and various press releases, "Founded in 1997, the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) is the professional association for film journalists, scholars and historians who publish their reviews, interviews and essays exclusively or primarily in the online media. The mission of the society is to further the growth of an informed film audience through the online media and to promote awareness of the Internet as a viable media alternative."

So who's in the OFCS you might know? Lots of great writers like James Berardinelli, Ed Gonzalez, MaryAnn Johanson, Christopher Null, Nick Schager, Eric D. Snider, and a whole bunch more. (Note to link-clickers: Aside from the fact that they host our website and message boards, the OFCS is not really affiliated with the awesome Rotten Tomatoes.) Plus we're planning to add a bunch of great new critics within the next several months.

Anyway, one of the things that we (as a large group of hardcore movie nerds) like to do is combine our opinions and come up with our own year-end nominations and winners and such. Just like all the other movie sites and critics groups do, only hopefully with a noted degree of good taste. Here's how we vote: ALL our members get a ballot with 5 empty spots for each category. They fill in the spots as they see fit, and then we use our tabulation methods to get the nominees. Then we vote again for the winners. So aside from a small amount of message board "lobbying," it's really a wide-open voting process -- which means we're very bad at predicting the Oscar winners, but we're very good at knowing what movies we, as professional movie critics and passionate cinema junkies, like the best.

Enough blather. Here are our nominees for 2007.

The Online Film Critics Society (of which Cinematical's own Scott Weinberg is a member) have spoken, and named their picks for the best films, performances and more of 2006. A recent arrival to the critic's boards awards season, the OFCS has been known for slightly off-center picks that often speak to very different sensibility than print and broadcast critics. As if to demonstrate this very point, a brief persual of the nominees and winners (designated in bold) after the jump will reveal that the OFCS has recognized a broad and fascinating slate of films in 2006 -- including Best Picture honors for United 93, plus individual wins for Oscar dark-horses like Borat, The Fountain, A Scanner Darkly and Children of Men. ...