Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender in Fish Tank
Curiously, even though A Prophet was also in the running in the London Film Critics' Foreign Language Film of the Year category, it lost to Tomas Alfredson's vampire drama Let the One Right In, which received a whole array of US critics' awards early last year. (The film opened in the US in 2008.)
The top winner of the evening, however, was Andrea Arnold's family drama Fish Tank, which earned awards for British Film of the Year, British Director, British Newcomer (Katie Jarvis), and British Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender). The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow — another woman — was Director of the Year. Bigelow, in fact, was the first female to win the London Critics' Director of the Year award. She joins the likes of Andrzej Wajda, Akira Kurosawa, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Terence Davies, John Huston, Martin Scorsese, Ang Lee, and Robert Altman.
Needless to say, the Arnold-Bigelow double whammy was also a London Critics' first, though two other women had previously won the British Director of the Year award, Gurinder Chadha for What's Cooking in 2001 and Lynne Ramsay for Ratcatcher in 1999. (Andrea Arnold is currently working on a new adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. That should be interesting.)
The two performers expected to win this year's Oscar in the supporting categories, Christoph Waltz and Mo'Nique, were voted Actor and Actress of the Year for, respectively, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and Lee Daniels' Precious.
Relative newcomer Carey Mulligan (above) and veteran Colin Firth were the British Actor and Actress of the Year for, respectively, Lone Scherfig's An Education and Tom Ford's A Single Man. Both have been nominated for Oscars, though neither is expected to win. Anne Marie Duff, playing John Lennon's mother in Nowhere Boy, was the British Supporting Actress of the Year.
Quentin Tarantino was present to receive a special career achievement award. "Hands down — this is the middle of my career," Tarantino told the crowd. "I like the idea of giving the award to someone where you think their best work might still be in front of them as an encouragement."
Other London Critics' winners were Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci and Tony Roche for the political satire In the Loop and Duncan Jones as Breakthrough British Filmmaker for the sci-fi thriller Moon.
Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the first London Critics Award Film of the Year winner, was named the best film of the last 30 years.
Quentin Tarantino quote: BBC
Photo: Fish Tank (Holly Horner / IFC Films); An Education (Kerry Brown / Sony Pictures Classics)