The most interesting winner at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards was best supporting actress Luminita Gheorghiu (above, with Ion Fiscuteanu), who plays a nurse assisting a sick old man in Cristi Puiu's acclaimed Romanian comedy-drama The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.
Not only was Gheorghiu's win a major surprise — U.S. film critics only sporadically opt for performers acting in non-English-language productions — but I could visualize Catherine O'Hara, one of this year's top best supporting actress contenders and National Board of Review Award winner going nuts because L.A. critics chose a Romanian instead of her. (I saw the funny For Your Consideration yesterday; in that film, there's a French Oscar nominee who inadvertently pushes O'Hara's Oscar contender character off the deep end.)
Among the other LAFCA winners were best film Letters from Iwo Jima (in Japanese, but directed by English speaker Clint Eastwood); best director Paul Greengrass for United 93; best actress Helen Mirren for The Queen (above); best foreign language film The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's spy melodrama that clearly has its fans (I'm not one of them); and best actors (it was a tie) Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland and Sacha Baron Cohen for Borat – Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
Frightening thought: Cohen will become the Roberto Benigni of 2007, walking on chairs at the Oscar ceremony, and then gushing about wanting to make love to the Kodak Theater audience in "the firmament."
The Envelope's Tom O'Neil has a thorough article on the voting procedures of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.