Critics and Awards Season
Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova in Once
Jack Mathews‘ "Next Up in Oscar Race: Voters Who Matter" in the New York Daily News:
"It’s been fun watching the evolution of the awards, as critics’ groups narrowed the field with their collective awards while breaking the hearts of many of the individual members. Movies that will end up on many top 10 lists didn’t even get a nod of collective approval. When the small Irish musical Once opened in May, it received almost universal praise and with an 88 (out of 100) score on the review collating site metacritic.com, it’s the year’s third best-reviewed film. Only No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly rank higher, yet Once is completely off the awards radar screen."
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Jack Mathews again: "Jack’s Pix for Best Pix" in the New York Daily News:
"I dropped out of the New York Film Critics Circle a few years back because I thought its awards voting process was corrupt. Many of its winners are compromise candidates that score third or fourth on the first ballot and, after several more politically-motivated ballots, come in first.
"In fact, as many critics vote AGAINST movies as vote for them."
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Stephen Witty’s "Critical Mess" in the New Jersey Star-Ledger:
"I chaired Monday’s vote of the New York Film Critics Circle. But after I’ve read some of the reports on it, I wonder if I was just dreaming.
"I’ve read about how the old guard rallied to keep the difficult [Bob] Dylan picture I’m Not There [right, with Cate Blanchett] from winning any awards. I’ve read how we honored No Country for Old Men only because other critics groups had honored There Will Be Blood, or that we only mentioned Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone because everyone else did.
"I’ve read that our foreign-language prize to The Lives of Others, last year’s Oscar-winner, showed our reluctance to support new films, or demonstrated a lack of imagination. I’ve read, from a disgruntled ex-member, that our entire voting process was corrupt. I’ve even read that I wasn’t the chairperson at all.
"What I haven’t read are many facts."
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Scott Foundas in "To Everything There Is a Season" in the LA Weekly:
"As the editor of this paper’s film pages as well as the chief critic, I try to afford as little coverage as possible to the phenomenon known as ‘awards season,’ in large part because it is a season presumed to end with the handing out of the Oscars — a statuette whose golden luster has been so tarnished by the number of thoroughly undeserving films upon which it has been bestowed in recent years (Crash, The Departed, Chicago, A Beautiful Mind, American Beauty) that one can scarcely be expected to take it seriously as a barometer of the year’s best film achievements. And when you hear the ballyhoo that, in 2007, the likes of Atonement, American Gangster, The Kite Runner and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are seen as serious Academy Award contenders, you know it’s going to be business as usual come Oscar night. Yet, the blogosphere and mainstream print media alike continue to pour forth with Oscar soothsayers, whose column inches rival or exceed what these same newspapers and websites devote to legitimate film criticism, implying that how you play the game (which is to say, whether the films in question are any good or not) is considerably less important than whether you win or lose."
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Patrick Goldstein’s "Critics make much ado about Oscar" in the Los Angeles Times:
"Just when you think the media’s intoxication with Oscar and Golden Globes buzz has finally reached a fever pitch, some new brawl breaks out that takes it to a new level of hysteria. Current highlights include: A rant by LA Weekly critic Scott Foundas, who wrote off a string of recent best picture winners (including The Departed, Crash and American Beauty) as "thoroughly undeserving" of real achievement, then went on to dismiss Oscar soothsayers as "pseudo-journalistic white noise" taking up valuable column inches that could be devoted to legitimate film criticism.
"This provoked a tart zinger from Oscar blogger Scott Feinberg on his website andthewinneris.blog.com. Feinberg asked, referring to Foundas’ account of the LA Film critics’ voting, ‘How do you have the gall to participate in an awards season vote and then criticize those of us who cover it?’ That came just days before Feinberg, assessing Thursday’s Golden Globe nominations, described the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. as ‘one of the most corrupt, pathetic, kowtowing groups of awards voters imaginable.’"
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Tags: Critics Choices, Film Awards, Glen Hansard, Jack Matthews, Once, Patrick Goldstein, Scott Feinberg, Scott Foundas, Stephen Witty
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