The Dallas film critics spread their best of 06' picks this year - Scorsese walks off with Best Director, but Paul Greengrass' United 93 is tops with Best Picture.
The reason why I like receiving this press release – is because usually those who assist in Sundance Institute’ screenwriting labs – are the ones who’ll I’ll end up treasuring – here is a most recent list: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s HALF NELSON, Dito Montiel’s A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS, Hilary Brougher’s STEPHANIE DALEY, Goran Dukic’s WRISTCUTTERS, Michael Kang’s THE MOTEL, and Cam Archer’s WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN...
Last year, it surfaced on a couple of sites and was featured in Entertainment Weekly. The Black List (has little to do with the images I posted above) is a top 10 best unproduced screenplays complied by (you fill in the blank) insiders at talent agencies, management companies, and film studios.
Promoting themselves as a barometer for Oscar predictions – this pretty much group all the favorites and safe picks. Leading the pack are “Babel," "The Departed," "Dreamgirls" and "Little Miss Sunshine" each with seven nominations each. Now its in 12th year, the Critics Choice Award is voted on by film critics from almost 200 television, radio and online critics. The 12th annual Critics’ Choice Awards ceremony will be held on Friday, January 12, 2007, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.
The Los Angeles Critics Association picked their winners for 2006, and like the previously announced picks by the National Board of Review, it appears that this year’s clear fav is Letters From Iwo Jima. Also amongst the populist vote was The Queen – it picked up a no brainer best actress win for Helen Mirren, but also gave best supporting actor to Michael Sheen who did a great job at playing Tony Blair and a best screenplay for Peter Morgan – who manages to captivate the audiences’ attention from first act to last fade out. Some other worthy mentions that may not be the consensus with other associations are the nods to the production value for the upcoming Children of Men and a big cred goes to L.A Critics for having the balls to pick Sacha Baron Cohen (a tie with Whitaker) for Best Actor. The critics also had the foresight to vote the powerful and overlooked doc film Darwin's Nightmare for the runner-up prize and my biggest surprise was to see that more than one person manage to see the restrained yet commanding performance from Luminita Gheorghiu in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. She picks up a Best Supporting actress win for a Romanian film that was released in the U.S by Tartan Films in the early calendar.