Women Film Critics Circle

2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010

BEST PICTURE BY A WOMAN [tie]
Away From Her: Sarah Polley
Talk To Me: Kasi Lemmons

BEST PICTURE ABOUT WOMEN
Juno: Jason Reitman

BEST WOMAN STORYTELLER [Screenwriting Award]
Juno: Diablo Cody

BEST ACTRESS
Laura Linney: The Savages

BEST COMEDIC PERFORMANCE
Amy Adams: Enchanted

BEST ACTOR
Daniel Day-Lewis: There Will Be Blood

BEST YOUNG ACTRESS
Saoirse Ronan: Atonement

BEST FEMALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE [tie]
Hairspray
Life Support

BEST FOREIGN FILM [tie]
La Vie En Rose
Persepolis

BEST MUSIC
Hairspray: Nikki Blonsky, Queen Latifah

BEST THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED MOVIE BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
Life Support

**ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD
For a film that most passionately opposes violence against women
Redacted

**JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD
For best expressing the woman of color experience in America:
The Great Debaters

**KAREN MORLEY AWARD
For best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity:
A Mighty Heart

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Judi Dench

SPECIAL MENTION FOR A FEMALE’S RIGHT TO MALE ROLES IN MOVIES
Cate Blanchett: I’m Not There

ACTING AND ACTIVISM
Angelina Jolie

BEST DOCUMENTARIES

ABOVE AND BEYOND
Redacted [mixed media]
GROUNDBREAKER
Strange Culture: Lynn Hershman-Leeson
COURAGE IN FILMMAKING
Meeting Resistance: Molly Bingham, co-director

BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES [tie]
Away From Her
Becoming Jane

MOST OFFENSIVE MALE CHARACTERS
Crazy Love [Burt Pugach] *****Winning Loser
Norbit [Rasputia] *****Winning Looser
Good Luck Chuck
The Heartbreak Kid
Knocked Up
Revolver
Superbad
Who’s Your Caddy

WFCC TOP TEN HALL OF SHAME
Black Snake Moan***Winning Loser
Exterminating Angels***Winning Loser
Goya’s Ghost***Winning Loser
Atonement
Captivity
Gone Baby Gone
Hairspray/Edna [John Travolta]
Lust, Caution
Norbit/Rasputia [Eddie Murphy]
Red Road

BEST ANIMATED FEMALE
Enchanted: Elle

BEST FAMILY FILM
Enchanted
**ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Adrienne Shelly was a promising actress and filmmaker who was brutally strangled in her apartment in 2006 at the age of forty by a construction worker in the building, after she complained about noise. Her killer tried to cover up his crime by hanging her from a shower rack in her bathroom, to make it look like a suicide. He later confessed that he was having a “bad day.” Shelly, who left behind a baby daughter, had just completed her film Waitress, which she also starred in, and which was honored at Sundance after her death.

**JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD; The daughter of a laundress and a musician, Baker overcame being born black, female and poor, and marriage at age fifteen, to become an internationally acclaimed legendary performer, starring in the films Princess Tam Tam, Moulin Rouge and Zou Zou. She also survived the race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois as a child, and later expatriated to France to escape US racism. After participating heroically in the underground French Resistance during WWII, Baker returned to the US where she was a crusader for racial equality. Her activism led to attacks against her by reporter Walter Winchell who denounced her as a communist, leading her to wage a battle against him. Baker was instrumental in ending segregation in many theaters and clubs, where she refused to perform unless integration was implemented.

**KAREN MORLEY AWARD: Karen Morley was a promising Hollywood star in the 1930s, in such films as Mata Hari and Our Daily Bread. She was driven out of Hollywood for her political convictions by the Blacklist and for refusing to testify against other actors, while Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden were informants against her. And also for daring to have a child and become a mother, unacceptable for female stars in those days. Morley maintained her outspoken political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.

**The Woman’s Right To Male Roles In Movies Award is intended to challenge that men have not only the most prominent roles in films, but also the most complex and fully drawn out characters. So when an actress can fight for access to such a role, and it may be rewritten for her, it is one of substance, and free of the usual shallow or demonized female stereotypes.

The Women Film Critics Circle website is WFCC.wordpress.com, and they can be reached at: Criticalwomen@gmail.com.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon