Not that you'll care on the day – you'll be too busy wondering where Reese Witherspoon bought her wonderful shoes – but No Country For Old Men looks like the movie to beat come Oscar Night.
The New York Film Critics Circle yesterday announced the winners of their annual awards, and No Country For Old Men came out on top. As with all movie awards, industry experts are already analysing the results to see how the New York awards will influence the result of next year's Oscars, which already looks like a two-horse race between No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. That's at least until the East Surrey Association Of Women Who Get The Bus To The Supermarket On Thursday Mornings reveals that I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry is their choice for top movie of the year. Very influential bunch, them.
You know, if you're part of an organisation and you haven't managed to tell the world what films you like in a deliberately haughty way to make it seem like you're more important than you actually are, you should really get a wriggle on, because you're falling behind.
Awards season still has 11 weeks of mindless, endless backslapping to go as everyone from actors to producers to the illegal immigrant gardeners of the producers to the people who look after the illegal immigrant gardeners' poorly cats when they go and do gardening for the producers prepares their list of what films they did and didn't like this year in the hope that it'll somehow influence the results of the Oscars.
And already, in these inexplicably still quite dull early stages of awards season, two films are emerging as the movies to beat on oscar Night. There's There Will Be Blood, which won the LA Film Critics Association a couple of days ago, and there's No Country For Old Men, the Coen brothers film that won the National Board Of Review prize last week and scooped the New York Film Critics Circle Best Movie Best Picture award, as announced last night.
No Country For Old Men didn't just win Best Picture – it also won Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem. Best Actor, as with the LA awards, went to Daniel Day-Lewis for his slow-speaking role in There Will Be Blood. The New York Film Critics Circle also continued the impressive run of wins for Amy Ryan, who so far hasn't managed to lose any Best Supporting Actress awards for her role in Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone.
Looking good, huh? So far the big award-winners are a movie that isn't being released in this country until next month, a movie that hasn't been released anywhere yet and a film that nobody in Britain will ever see because of that Madeleine McCann thing. Who knows, by the time the Oscars are revealed, we might have even watched one of the winning films. Let's hope not – we're not sure our hearts could take the strain.
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