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By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, December 15th, 2006 - 9 Comments »
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The British Are Coming

The nominations for the London Critics’ Circle Film Awards are in…
Of course, they are on a somewhat different scheudle than we are here, so noms for films like The Squid & The Whale , Good NIght, And Good Luck, and The Upside of Anger are to be found.
On the flipside, they could have nominated Peter O’Toole and didn’t, choosing Sacha Baron Cohen, Christian Bale, Jeff Daniels, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Richard Griffiths, Toby Jones, James McAvoy, Timothy Spall, David Strathairn, and Forest Whitaker instead.
There is no Daniel Craig nod either. And given the love for Children of Men, I am surprised they went for Michael Caine in The Prestige instead of COM. (I am rooting for Nighy in Supporting, though Caine is great in both roles.) In the one category that has no Brit-specific version, screenwriting, it is interesting that 4 of 5 are non-Brits (3 American, 1 Mexican).
Also of interest, another Sacha Baron Cohen nod, another foreign language nod to Apocalypto, the inclusion of Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, and a real opportunity for an upset win (in American eyes) in Loraine Stanley for London to Brighton, a black-hearted drama with a very raw, critic-friendly performance.
The big awards… which are split between “Film of the Year” and “British Film of The Year”… have The Queen as the only film in both categories and an embrace of the very American, but directed by a Brit, United 93 and the very Spanish Volver.
The Attenborough Award, British Film of the Year
Children of Men directed by Alfonso Cuaron (UIP/UK)
The Queen directed by Stephen Frears (Pathe)
Red Road directed by Andrea Arnold (Verve Pictures)
The Last King of Scotland directed by Kevin Macdonald (20th Century Fox)
The Wind That Shakes the Barley directed by Ken Loach (Pathe)
Film of the Year
The Departed directed by Martin Scorsese (Entertainment)
Little Miss Sunshine directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (20th Century Fox)
Volver directed by Pedro Almodovar (Pathe)
United 93 directed by Paul Greengrass (UIP/UK)
The Queen directed by Stephen Frears (Pathe)
The group’s rep tells me the films eligible for nomination were those released in the UK between February 1, 2006 and February 11, 2007, the date of the Baftas.
Amongst the late year or last year films considered and snubbed for non-Brit awards were Babel, Dreamgirls, The Pursuit of Happyness , Flags of Our Fathers (but not Letters From Iwo Jima), Blood Diamond, Bobby, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Walk the Line, and Brick.
The rest on MCN

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9 Comments »

9 Responses to “The British Are Coming”

  1. Lota says:
    December 15, 2006 at 6:00 pm

    i want verhoeven to get Black Book love
    i want to live in a world where Verhoeven upstages Clint. he’s got enough awards and not even for his best stuff (Play Misty for Me).

  2. Jeremy Smith says:
    December 15, 2006 at 7:13 pm

    Why did the LCC name their award for the year’s best British film after a guy who’s never directed a good movie?
    Amen on BLACK BOOK, Lota. I think it’s Verhoeven’s best work since ROBOCOP, and a reminder that, Hollywood transgressions aside, he’s still one of the world’s elite filmmakers.

  3. Jeremy Smith says:
    December 15, 2006 at 7:14 pm

    And some love for Carice van Houten is in order, too.

  4. Me says:
    December 15, 2006 at 8:28 pm

    Attenborough may not have made many good movies, but he did make Shadowlands, which is a great one. It has Anthony Hopkins at the height of his glory, a beautiful and intelligent script about how love and pain have to co-exist for either to mean anything, and some really beautiful scenes of the British land. It’s not a flashy movie, but it is certainly better than anything that’s come out in the last few years.

  6. MattM says:
    December 15, 2006 at 9:11 pm

    One true oddity–Richard Griffiths is nominated for “Actor of The Year” overall, but not nominated as “Best British Actor.” Particularly strange, since both Cohen and Jones are playing non-Brits, while Griffiths is playing the epitome of a Brit.

  7. MarkVH says:
    December 16, 2006 at 9:28 am

    They don’t matter they don’t matter blah blah blah…

  8. Cadavra says:
    December 16, 2006 at 12:11 pm

    Amen on Van Houten. The Academy damn well better take notice next year.

  9. cleghorn says:
    January 5, 2007 at 9:12 am

    Just read this – we named an award after Lord Attenborough as an 80th birthday present and British Film seemed the appropriate one because, whatever one thinks of him as a director, and the Academy liked Gandhi, although that may not be saying much given some of the awards it has bestowed and some it has failed to give, he has been a major force in the British Film industry for over 60 years.
    As for snubbing films and performances in our current list of nominees, the truth is that we often do not get the chance to see some in sufficient numbers – the Academy and Bafta voters, and I suspect the Hollywood Foreign Press, get DVDs, we don’t. It depends very much on how efficient the distributor is at laying on screenings and December/January/February releases in particular are at a disadvantage. In addition not all of the films that are eligible for the Oscars open here in time. We did get DVDs of the Greengrass movie, which may well have been a factor in its appearance, because, although lots of people saw it when it was released some time ago, that helped refresh memories.

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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