The most curious thing about indieWIRE’s 2008 poll of 105 North American film critics is that thus far only six of those critics’ top-ten films have gone on to win awards (film/director/screenplay) from US/Canada critics’ groups.
WALL-E has been the top choice in the animated feature category and was even voted the best film of 2008 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, which, spreading the wealth, also gave Waltz with Bashir their best animated feature prize. Happy-Go-Lucky took best director and best screenplay honors from, respectively, the New York and the Los Angeles critics; Still Life was chosen best foreign-language film in Los Angeles; Synecdoche, New York won a couple of best screenplay awards; while Wendy and Lucy was chosen best film by the Toronto critics.
That’s pretty much it.
Even stranger, the indieWIRE critics’ top film, The Flight of the Red Balloon hasn’t won anything so far, while A Christmas Tale, Paranoid Park, and Silent Light have earned only scattered mentions. Go figure.
What about critics’ awards-season favorite Slumdog Millionaire? Well, scroll down to the no. 28 spot. (Though Danny Boyle is listed in seventh place among the best directors.)
I can understand discrepancies due to different ways of weighing each vote and because the survey surely includes critics that don’t belong to any of the various groups and associations, but a chasm that wide between the indieWIRE best film list and the critics’ own award lists is mind-boggling. Perhaps when handing out awards, critics feel that if they select little-known, foreign films — six and a half of the top-ten films in the indieWIRE list are non-American (Paranoid Park is a France/US co-production) — their choices would be deemed irrelevant, since people (and the media) seem to only care about which groups’ choices will most accurately predict Hollywood’s Academy Awards.
By the way, among the strong Oscar contenders found in the list are Milk (15), The Dark Knight (22), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (34), Frost/Nixon (75), Revolutionary Road (94), and Doubt (99).
The list featuring the top performances of 2008 matches more closely the North American critics’ award winners, perhaps because six of the top-ten actors starred in US-made productions. The list includes critics’ winners Mickey Rourke (above) in the top spot for The Wrestler, plus Sean Penn (Milk), Sally Hawkins (for the British-made Happy-Go-Lucky), Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), and Melissa Leo (Frozen River).
Michelle Williams did win in Toronto and remains a possibility for a best actress Oscar nomination, but the inclusion of Asia Argento (for three films), Juliette Binoche, and the recently deceased Guillaume Depardieu was more than a bit surprising.
Additionally, the indieWIRE lists include critics’ choices for best supporting performance (top choice: Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight), best director (top choice: Hou Hsiao-hsien, The Flight of the Red Balloon), best screenplay (top choice: Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York), best documentary (top choice: multiple award winner Man on Wire by James Marsh), best first film (top choice: Ballast by Lance Hammer), and best undistributed film (top choice: The Headless Woman by Lucrecia Martel).
I didn’t care for the Red Balloon. It didn’t deserve any awards.
Maybe the difference has to do with the kind of consensus critics groups must reach when they select their top films. I’ve read that sometimes the favorites are discarded along the way so that a film that most critics actually like at least some ends up being the winner.