In Time, Richard Corliss on the New York Film Critics' picks:
"I sprinted down the corridors of TIME this afternoon, eager to spread the news of the New York Film Critics Circle voting for the year's best films. The winner, in the film, director, screenplay and supporting actor categories? The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, which three different people told me they'd been meaning to see. The runner-up, with wins for best actor and cinematographer? There Will Be Blood, an audience-punishing epic that doesn't open for another two weeks. Best actress? Julie Christie, in Away From Her [above, with Gordon Pinsent], which earned less than $5 million in its North American release.
"I didn't even tell them that the very popular, and very good, Pixar cartoon Ratatouille lost out to a French movie about the troubles in Iran. (Though Persepolis, take my word for it, is funny.) By the time I'd got back to my office I had realized that we critics may give these awards to the winners, but we give them for ourselves. In fact, we're essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us."
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In his Time magazine commentary about the recent flurry of U.S. critics' awards, Richard Corliss — whose writing can be quite entertaining — manages to sound both populist (see the above quote) and condescending ("moviegoers who are TV viewers don't want horse races; they want coronations — validations that somebody in Hollywood is ready to honor the movies they love"). Not a very good combination.
Corliss' piece is particularly unfortunate because nowhere in it does he state that those critics' awards actually help the films that most need this sort of publicity — or, for that matter, any sort of publicity: the smaller movies, whose distributors don't have the means — or sometimes even the desire — to promote them.
True, film critics' awards won't make Wild Hogs, Jackass, and Knocked Up fans go out of their way to catch Away from Her or Persepolis. Most of those moviegoers, if they can read at all, don't bother reading film reviews or critics' year-end picks. That said, many other moviegoers who had never heard of the — in Corliss' words — "obscure names" in critics' year-end lists may now decide to buy a ticket or rent a DVD so as to watch Julie Christie deliver a marvelous performance as a woman suffering from Alzheimer's, or check out Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's humorous take on Iran's Islamic revolution.
Indeed, critics have always helped to create box-office buzz around films that otherwise would never have found their audience, e.g., Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (above), Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence. Those and others like them went on to garner several Academy Award nominations and, relatively speaking, hefty revenues. Just in the last decade or so, critics' raves and year-end awards have helped to create box-office hits out of "uncommercial" fare as diverse as Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies, Alexander Payne's Sideways, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain.
Now, despite Corliss' populist stance at the beginning of his article, a large number of U.S. critics have actually forgotten they write for adults and not for the 12-year-olds for whom most Hollywood movies are produced. In fact, generally speaking, even their best-of-the-year choices seem to take into consideration which names may have a chance to land an Oscar nod so their particular critics' group won't seem too esoteric — and thus irrelevant to both the mainstream media and the public at large. (Newsday's Jack Mathews said something along those lines a couple of years ago: "Gone are the days when the New York critics sought to acknowledge great films that Hollywood would ignore. Like everyone else, they're caught up in the Oscar race.")
That probably explains why so few "experimental," really obscure, and/or non-English-language productions, no matter how excellent, end up in U.S. critics' year-end lists. For instance: thus far, despite a number of raves earlier in the year, Alain Resnais' Private Fears in Public Places (above, with André Dussollier and Laura Morante) — my favorite 2007 release, and one that happens to be "experimental," really obscure (in the U.S. — it played for about a week in L.A. and disappeared), and foreign — has been completely ignored by U.S. critics' groups in every category. (Admittedly, that wasn't always the case, and exceptions to that rule do pop up every now and then, such as this year's several wins for the US-French co-production The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and for Marion Cotillard's performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.)
Yet, while Corliss teasingly complains about his fellow reviewers' choices while both lifting up and putting down the ignored and ignorant masses, I look at those lists with interest. Despite their Oscar bent and groupthink approach to their selections, U.S. critics' year-end choices often give me the chance to discover big and small gems that I — and, I'm sure, many others — would have otherwise overlooked.