By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
New York Film Critics Circle is now FIRST!
So, the New York Film Critics Circle announced today that it’s moving up its voting to November 28, beating out the New York Board of Review. Huzzah. What’s the point of this, exactly? As David pointed out in his Hot Blog post about this, it’s about being FIRST! and nothing more. It reduces the legitimacy and relevance of the NYFCC to the desire to be seen as FIRST! to the discussion about something most everyone on the writing side of our industry likes to pretend doesn’t matter. You want to set a group of film journalists at each others’ throats in a hurry? Start speculating about awards season, then step back out of the fray and watch in amusement as pundits pontificate and skeptics get their shorts in a bunch about criticism versus Oscars. It’s almost as fun as starting a debate about the merits of junkets, and where we draw the line between journalism and publicity.
The reality is that most of us do speculate, or at least think about awards season, whether we write about it or Guru about it or what have you, or whether we don’t. Every other conversation in lines and at late-hour drinking binges at the bars between the Lightbox and Scotiabank at Toronto this year was about whether this or that film’s TIFF reception boded well — or ill — for awards season hopes. Same as last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. Whether the NYFCC votes before or after the Board of Review means, really, bupkis, other than possibly screwing over the few films who actually prefer to wait to screen their films in December. You know, the last month of the year for which NYFCC is supposedly voting on their awards. And perhaps it will force some of those distributors to decide if they’ll screen earlier to accommodate NYFCC or not, so that the NYFCC can see them FIRST! and thereby consider them in their voting. Or not.
Either way, really, does it matter? If a couple of distributors actually chose to say, sorry, we’re not changing our schedule because you’ve decided to change yours, what’s the worst that could happen? Is a truly legitimate awards contender likely to get cut from the pack just because the NYFCC didn’t see it in time to vote for it? If it’s really all that and a bag of chips, I don’t think so. The other groups will weigh in, in their time, the conversation will still happen, the Oscars will still go on. It’s like a pack of third graders pushing and shoving to be first in line to get the same cafeteria lunch every kid in line will end up with anyhow.
It’s all just so tiresome, this relentless desire of the internet age to be FIRST! and to say TOLDJA! and whatnot, even when the TOLDJAs are largely press releases that someone got an hour ahead of the pack, or the FIRST! is little more than a bid to be the first to officially say “Hey, these are the films we liked!” in a discussion that started at Toronto and will go on until Oscar night. Yawn.
Exactly right: NYFCC, way to make yourselves look silly. “We’re so prestigious, that we uh uh should be first!” Dude, it’s the other way around.