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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

New Awards From BFCA Critics' Choice

The BFCA Critics’ Choice Awards have eliminated one category — Best Family Film (live action). A major reason given by the group for this decision was that studios saw this award as having little value to its recipients and little impact with moviegoers.
But there is a new category to replace it… Best Action Movie.
Quoting the BFCA release, the category reflects “the enormous importance of this genre to moviegoers and studios alike. Just as the BFCA has pioneered the Best Animated Film and Best Comedy categories, we are now happy to spotlight the finest filmmaking in this category which is usually ignored during award season.”

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5 Responses to “New Awards From BFCA Critics' Choice”

  1. yancyskancy says:

    Feels like a way to let them honor The Dark Knight without giving it Best Picture.

  2. lazarus says:

    Exactly, yancy.
    Not that you should bite the hand that…uhh…shakes yours, DP, but to post a highly-critical item about the Independent Spirit Awards (albeit one that was entirely justified) while simply reporting the party line here is a little weak.
    You know this doesn’t have a lot of credibility. They won’t kick you out if you acknowledge that, no?
    “Just as they pioneered the Best Animated Film and Best Comedy categories”…whatever. Yeah, you’re fucking pioneers. Or studio ass-kissers, in other words.

  3. The BFCA is almost my favourite punching bag throughout the awards season. No offense, but they’re horrendous. And as Yancy said, this is just a way to appear “relevent” while chastising other award bodies for not being so. It’s not like studios are going to start using “BFCA Winner for Best Action Film!” on their DVD covers, is it?
    And, yeah, didn’t the Golden Globes pioneer separate comedy categories?

  4. David Poland says:

    Two things:
    1. I don’t think my position is unclear in this post.
    2. I don’t take BFCA, member or not, as seriously as the Indie Spirits… nor does BFCA. The problem I have with the Indie Spirits situations are that they position the whole thing as the major tentpole holding up indie against the power of The Oscars, but then run an operation that is one of the least transparent in town. An organization with a board of studio execs sends private committees into “smokey rooms” to decide what is nominated and then they put the final vote up to the public, in as far as anyone with 50 bucks to spend – getting a good bargain in free screenings alone – can vote.
    BFCA is mostly a junketeers group with a handful of serious critics. The aspirations for money and attention as manifested by the TV show is not 100% agreed on by all, but the group is pretty much run by Joey Berlin and the board rubber stamps. And unless I were to aspire to make real changes, beating it to death seems like picking on an easy target.
    Like the NYT, my serious reservations about FIND and The ISAs is generated by the perceived importance of the work and the organization, and not just shooting down another of the 1000s of things wrong aroung me every day.

  5. jeffmcm says:

    The post, as written, just barely implies an opinion.

Quote Unquotesee all »

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