We’ll have more confidence, or not, once the National Society of Film Critics announces their awards for this year.
Looking at last year’s awards, the NY winners overlap with the National Society playing field. It is reasonable to assume that the reverse has much validity - the National Society contenders are likely NY contenders as well.
NY 2020
Film: First Cow (Nat’l Society 2nd)
Foreign Language Film: Bacurau (Nat’l Society 2nd)
Director: Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) (Nat’l Society winner)
Screenplay: Eliza Hittman (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) (Nat’l Society winner)
Lead Actor: Delroy Lindo (Da 5 Bloods) (Nat’l Society winner)
Lead Actress: Sidney Flanigan (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) (Nat’l Society 3rd)
Featured Actor: Chadwick Boseman (Da 5 Bloods) (Nat’l Society 3rd)
Featured Actress: Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) (Nat’l Society winner)
Cinematography: Shabier Kirchner (Small Axe) (Nat’l Society 2nd)
Mister Tee wrote:BIG grain of salt here. This article claims to have info on runners-up. Multiple people have tweeted out denials, but it's hard to tell if they're denying the data or the claims of hotly-contested debates. The initial reporter stands by his story, says several members have anonymously confirmed his facts.
NY could avoid all this by returning to its long-time tradition of disclosing vote totals, but at this point they seem almost tribally determined to keep it secret.
Sabin wrote:All of which to say, I think the appropriate way to do this is for Best Foreign Language Film to occur after Best Film. Best Film should not be a consolation prize for something losing Best Foreign-Language Film. Or Best Non-Fiction or Animated Film as well.
So, congratulations to Drive My Car for being voted Best Film of 2021 except when stacked up against The Worst Person of the World.
Put another way: It may be that the people who voted for Worst Person in the World were people who, when it came to choosing overall best film, preferred multiple English-language titles, while the people who voted for Drive My Car thought it was the best movie whatever you put it up against. The non-Drive My Car crowd coalesced behind Worst Person in foreign-language film, but, in best film, they spread their support enough that Drive My Car emerged first past the post.
My idea for best film/foreign-language film -- and I thought of this back during that 3-year run in the early 70s, when NY when subtitle-crazy -- would be to vote for best film, and, if an English-language film emerged on top, then vote for a foreign-language one, but if, as in this case, a foreign-language film won, they'd vote for best English-language film...more or less along the lines of the Dog Show's best-of-opposite breed. I'd like to have known which English-language films would have prevailed in 1972/3/4 -- we can see from these results that you can't assume the second-place finisher (The Godfather and American Graffiti in '72/73) would have been it. (1974 is even wilder, because Scenes from a Marriage finished second to Amarcord; The Godfather Part II finished so far behind both that it's impossible to know how an English-only race would have turned out.)
Mister Tee wrote:BIG grain of salt here. This article claims to have info on runners-up. Multiple people have tweeted out denials, but it's hard to tell if they're denying the data or the claims of hotly-contested debates. The initial reporter stands by his story, says several members have anonymously confirmed his facts.
NY could avoid all this by returning to its long-time tradition of disclosing vote totals, but at this point they seem almost tribally determined to keep it secret.
BIG grain of salt here. This article claims to have info on runners-up. Multiple people have tweeted out denials, but it's hard to tell if they're denying the data or the claims of hotly-contested debates. The initial reporter stands by his story, says several members have anonymously confirmed his facts.
NY could avoid all this by returning to its long-time tradition of disclosing vote totals, but at this point they seem almost tribally determined to keep it secret.
Mister Tee wrote:But then there's NY's latter-day tendency to go off wacky. This has been happening certainly since the days of Cameron Diaz, but seems to have become more pronounced of late. And, I hate to have to say this, but it seems to happen a lot more often in the actress categories, lead actress especially. Most of the prominent lead actor contenders this past decade have won in NY: Day-Lewis with Lincoln, Casey Affleck, Cumberbatch today (with clear nominees like Pitt in Moneyball, Banderas in Hope and Glory also winning). But Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is really the last such one I can remember at NY -- it feels like, instead, these days, it's all Rachel Weisz/The Deep Blue Sea, Regina Hall, Lupita Nyong'o, Sidney Flanigan; people outside the primary conversation, not critics' picks in the same way as the male winners are.
Gaga is kind of a middle case, in that regard. She's been a bit in the Oscar conversation, but more as a populist candidate, not a critically-based one -- Colman, Cruz and Stewart would seem to fit the critics' pick profile far more exactly. And, who knows? -- maybe they were all there, involved in a tight race where Gaga slipped through (voting for the category took about 40 minutes, well longer than the 10-15 minutes for most awards). But it strikes me as continuing a trend of NY voters seeming to take best actress a bit less seriously -- willing to indulge a wild hair there in a way they don't seem to do as often in the male categories.
As I suspected, I have to run off, and I may add to this thesis later. But I'll leave it here now for others to pick over.
One more thing: when was the last time a studio film like West Side Story won cinematography? That one surprised me a lot.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but Ronan won twice and was firmly in the nomination conversation for both performances; Cotillard and Huppert were undeniably activist picks but they were also in the conversation. That said, it does feel like they go for an actor who might get boxed out of a nomination but is certainly already in the race (Redford, Lindo), whereas the actresses might not be in the race to begin with and the award is a boost. But only one more actor has been won compared to actress since 2010 (Firth/Lewis/Affleck vs Streep/Blanchett) but one more actress has been nominated for the Oscar over the same period of time. (Bening/Streep/Blanchett/Cotillard/Ronan/Huppert/Ronan vs Firth/Pit/Lewis/Affleck/Chamalet/Banderas).
re: Cinematography. Maybe Zero Dark Thirty? Though what's a studio? Is Netflix a studio (Roma)? Though looking at the history of the category, even when studios had adult oriented films, they still often went elsewhere for cinematography.
For what it's worth, Alissa Wilkinson, a NYFCC voter (Vox.com critic, and a good one) said on Twitter that there is no rule in the NYFCC bylaws that precludes a film from winning Foreign Film and Best Picture. Although they may have unofficial agreements and policies not to vote for a movie in both categories.
Gaga is a mere shrug for me as I haven't seen House of Gucci yet. I'm happy to see anyone other than presumed front-runner Stewart win at this point. I haven't seen Macbeth either but Kathryn Hunter has gotten raves for her 3 witches. Seems like a good pick whether or not it advances her Oscar chances.
Tee, I purposely broke our forebears (not ancestors as they are not all dead) into two groups - fathers from the 70s and grandfathers prior to that.
It began to change with Diaz and got worse to the point where they've almost become irrelevant as both an arbiter of critical enlightenment and a good indicator of where the Oscar "race" is headed.
The foreign language winners and runners-up in the 1970s were all great or near-great films. Cow and car movies they weren't.
The Sound of Music was not a favorite of a lot of the "grandfather" critics of the day although most of the "grandmother" critics liked it but they were outnumbered.
Magilla wrote below that they honored one thing to prove this and something else to prove that. I think these winners prove the opposite. It highlights process over hive mind.
We can't know the vote totals but what they tell me is that those Roma voters in 2018 were not just holding off enthusiasm to vote for it for Best Picture. If there was enough enthusiasm to push Roma over the top for Best Foreign Language Film, it would've won there, and something else would've taken Best Film later on. Judging from what we saw today, maybe Cold War would've won over whatever the IRL runner up was (I'm going to guess First Reformed). Similarly, had Drive My Car prevailed for Best Foreign-Language Film, it's possible that The Worst Person in The World might have won Best Film over (again, I'm guessing) The Power of the Dog. We obviously have no idea and much of it pertains to blocs of voters and who prefers what to what. But Drive My Car and Roma winning Best Film seem to be part of a grand American tradition of popular vote losers becoming electoral vote winners.
All of which to say, I think the appropriate way to do this is for Best Foreign Language Film to occur after Best Film. Best Film should not be a consolation prize for something losing Best Foreign-Language Film. Or Best Non-Fiction or Animated Film as well.
So, congratulations to Drive My Car for being voted Best Film of 2021 except when stacked up against The Worst Person of the World.
I'm out the door in half an hour, so may not have time to fully get into everything, but, to start:
NY's refusal to show vote totals, or even runners-up, makes it kind of impossible to understand what the big Drive My Car win means. It was certainly very well-reviewed, and was my prediction for foreign-language film. (That it didn't win there, plus the relatively quick best picture announcement, makes me wonder -- as with Cold War/Roma three years back -- if the critics vote best film first, but hold back the announcement till the end, so foreign-language was voted on with Drive My Car disqualified.) But there have been many many revered non-English language films over the decades, and, with exception of Roma (which, by virtue of Cuaron's Hollywood profile, was almost an honorary English-language effort), NY hasn't voted one the year's best since Amarcord in 1974. Was this win because Drive My Car is such a stunning work of screen art? Because enthusiasm for the two obvious top contenders (the directing and screenplay winners) couldn't quite achieve critical mass? Or because of a very tight contest that saw Drive My Car's bloc barely achieve plurality? Without seeing the full results, we have no idea, and it can look like a "see how cool we are" gesture to some.
Magilla says it's not your ancestors' NYFCC, but I have to amend that to say, it sometimes is and sometimes isn't. As I've probably said here multiple times, I've always viewed the NY Critics as the Oscars without sentimentality: though they'd pass on Oscar choices like The Sound of Music, or Lee Marvin or John Wayne, their picks were generally within the mainstream of critical/popular sensibility. They might occasionally veer off for, say, John Gielgud in Providence, but the same year, they'd choose Diane Keaton for Annie Hall, and the follow-up best actor would be Jon Voight/Coming Home. By and large, they'd reflect the movie year as most of us saw it, and award the best-reviewed films/performances, without the Academy's tendency to favor huge box-office hits and long-time veteran stars. Their choices haven't matched up with the Oscars in recent decades as much as they did during the long reign of Bosley Crowther, but they at least generally got nominations.
That's somewhat changed in the past decade or two, but not everywhere. There were a number of picks today that everyone could foresee or at least consider good possibilities: Cumberbatch, McPhee, Campion. There were some Twitter murmurs about Kathryn Hunter: One person tweeted "This doesn't help with the Oscars", essentially meaning she wasn't on the bloggers hot-prospects list, therefore irrelevant -- but she was clearly much singled-out in the Macbeth reviews, and therefore should have been expected as potential critics' winner; I listed her as runner-up. In fact, she's the kind pf performer who, in the old days, could be boosted into contention by a critics' push. (I wonder if that can still happen, or if the blogger wall-of-prediction is impregnable these days.)
But then there's NY's latter-day tendency to go off wacky. This has been happening certainly since the days of Cameron Diaz, but seems to have become more pronounced of late. And, I hate to have to say this, but it seems to happen a lot more often in the actress categories, lead actress especially. Most of the prominent lead actor contenders this past decade have won in NY: Day-Lewis with Lincoln, Casey Affleck, Cumberbatch today (with clear nominees like Pitt in Moneyball, Banderas in Hope and Glory also winning). But Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is really the last such one I can remember at NY -- it feels like, instead, these days, it's all Rachel Weisz/The Deep Blue Sea, Regina Hall, Lupita Nyong'o, Sidney Flanigan; people outside the primary conversation, not critics' picks in the same way as the male winners are.
Gaga is kind of a middle case, in that regard. She's been a bit in the Oscar conversation, but more as a populist candidate, not a critically-based one -- Colman, Cruz and Stewart would seem to fit the critics' pick profile far more exactly. And, who knows? -- maybe they were all there, involved in a tight race where Gaga slipped through (voting for the category took about 40 minutes, well longer than the 10-15 minutes for most awards). But it strikes me as continuing a trend of NY voters seeming to take best actress a bit less seriously -- willing to indulge a wild hair there in a way they don't seem to do as often in the male categories.
As I suspected, I have to run off, and I may add to this thesis later. But I'll leave it here now for others to pick over.
One more thing: when was the last time a studio film like West Side Story won cinematography? That one surprised me a lot.
Mister Tee wrote:BEST DIRECTOR: Jane Campion for "The Power of the Dog"
Regardless of what won Best Film, THE POWER OF THE DOG did very well today which certainly makes up for the inexplicable NBR shut-out. I know some folks were (eagerly) writing it off as a serious Oscar contender, but the movie is very much in the conversation.
Plus, it is currently sitting at number 3 in Netflix's top ten programs and is holding the very top spot in the movie section, which is pretty impressive for a very heavy, quiet drama like this.
BELFAST still seems like the movie most likely to win the Academy's heart, but Jane Campion and her beautiful film will hopefully not be ignored.
Last edited by rolotomasi99 on Fri Dec 03, 2021 6:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"When it comes to the subject of torture, I trust a woman who was married to James Cameron for three years."
-- Amy Poehler in praise of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow
Now you know why I didn't make predictions. I knew they would pick something for Best Picture to prove yet again that they are not their father's or grandfather's NYFC.
Just change the title of last year's winner to Milk My Cow and release it on a double-bill with Drive My Car - sure to get them back into theaters in droves (NOT!).
What's really shocking with this group is that they gave an award to a 64-year-old American born British actress and director. They had to give Best Actress to Lady Gaga to balance Kathryn Hunter just to keep their bad boy reputation.
