san francisco film critics circle Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Jeffrey M. Anderson's 400 Screens, 400 Blows - Critics Awards
Filed under: Awards », Columns », 400 Screens, 400 Blows »
Earlier this week, I along with 20 other San Francisco film critics assembled at an undisclosed location -- okay, it was a café -- to vote on the best films, best performances and best other stuff of 2007. It's an interesting experience. I spent a few weeks combing through the year's releases, coming up with my own choices. Then I second-guessed some of them, deciding whether I should eliminate certain choices. If I was absolutely certain that someone would make the final ballot, then I would cast a vote for someone more obscure, someone I really liked. After doing that, I scrapped the whole thing and went back to my favorites in each category, regardless of where they placed.
For Best Supporting Actress, I selected Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone (301 screens) as my #1 choice, comfortable in my certainty that she was a dark horse and that no one else would pick her. She was far from being the focus of that film, but she knocked a home run in her few scenes as a horrible, drug-ridden mother who has lost her baby girl. As a bonus, she was also in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (321 screens), a film that also made a decent showing on my personal ballot. (She lost a few points by being in the wretched Dan in Real Life, but gained them back again by being on TV's "The Wire.") In any case, Ryan not only made our final ballot, but she actually won. Congratulations, Amy! My other picks, Taraji P. Henson in Talk to Me, Kristen Thomson in Away from Her, and Maggie Smith in Becoming Jane, didn't make it so far. As for my fifth pick, Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There (148 screens), you've not heard that last of her.
San Francisco Film Critics Weigh in with Year-End Awards
Filed under: Awards », Oscar Watch »
The San Francisco Film Critics Circle (of which Cinematical's Jeffrey Anderson and Richard Von Busack are members) cast their votes last night and Todd Field's Little Children came up as the front-runner, with three awards. The drama about cheating suburban parents took Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay (written by Todd Field and Tom Perrotta). And former child actor Jackie Earle Haley won Best Supporting Actor for his comeback performance as a registered sex offender.Though the group is the first to pick Little Children as Best Picture, their choices for Helen Mirren as Best Actress for The Queen and Paul Greengrass as Best Director for United 93 follow suit with the nation's other critics groups.
Sacha Baron Cohen won Best Actor for his improvisational performance in the comedy documentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The group has previously showed goodwill toward comedians, giving Bill Murray the Best Actor award in 2003.
Adriana Barraza rounded out the acting categories by winning Best Supporting Actress for her performance as a conflicted Mexican nanny in Babel.
Rian Johnson won Best Original Screenplay for the high school noir Brick, his first produced feature. Best Documentary honors went to Al Gore's climate crisis study An Inconvenient Truth, and Best Foreign Film went to Guillermo Del Toro's visionary fantasy Pan's Labyrinth.
Finally the group awarded their Marlon Riggs Award "for courage & vision in the Bay Area film community" to Stehen Salmons, the director of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. A Special Citation, named for former member Arthur Lazere, who passed away earlier this year, was awarded to a movie that otherwise would have "fallen through the cracks," The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.
This was the group's fifth annual awards. The group formed in 2002 and consists of representatives of the Bay Area print and online critical community. Previous winners have included Sideways (six awards), Brokeback Mountain (three awards) and Lost in Translation (two awards).
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