You see, even though every single living organism on the face of the Earth has already been to see The Dark Knight about 17 times already, producers are scared that the Academy will forget about it come Oscar nomination time, which is why they’ve pencilled in another theatrical release of The Dark Knight for January.

Of course, by January The Dark Knight’s bloated special effects are going to look foolish up against the more intelligent, issue-led fare of awards season, which is why Christopher Nolan is currently busy re-editing the movie to make Batman look like the widower of mentally-disabled United Nations worker killed in Darfur by a missile built in Iraq but funded by the American government, who are obviously the real baddies in all of this.

The Dark Knight is officially a sensation. It’s the second-highest grossing movie in all of history; critics and fans have lavished it with praise, calling it one of the best movies ever made and it’s actually so good that we can’t even watch films any more because we end up projectile vomiting all over the upholstery because none of them are even a tenth as good as The Dark Knight.

But, despite all this, will The Dark Knight actually win any Oscars? Well, probably not. It might deserve a few, but it won’t win them for the following reasons:

1) Hollywood still has a stigma about rewarding superhero movies in the main Oscar categories.

2) The Dark Knight came out in the summer, and people only seriously consider movies for the Oscars if they’re released between October and February.

3) Sean Penn will probably release an incredibly serious movie right before the Oscars where he’ll play someone either disabled or historically significant and everyone who can vote for the Oscars will roll around on their backs playing with themselves going “Uuuuh, Sean Penn! Uuuuh, Sean Penn! Muh muh moo muh moo!” as soon as they see it and he’ll win everything instead.

Or at least that was the theory. But now the clever producers of The Dark Knight have struck upon a cunning ruse to jolt the movie back into everyone’s memory come Oscar time. No, sadly they’re not going to exhume Heath Ledger’s body and make it dance marionette-style to the hits of Prince up and down the streets of Hollywood right before Oscar night.

Instead they’re just going to release The Dark Knight in cinemas again in January. BBC News reports:

Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight could be re-released in cinemas in January, ay the height of the Oscar voting season. Warner Bros is in talks with Imax over the prospect of restoring the film to some big-screen theatres. It is hoped the push will help the film’s Academy Award chances, trade paper The Hollywood Reporter said.

Oh, OK, maybe we should calm down a little in that case. The Dark Knight is only going to get re-released at Imax cinemas. That means, if it’s anything like the last run, we’ll never get tickets to see it anyway because all the showings will be sold-out, even a month in advance, even at 3am.

So, in that case, we’ll be giving our Oscar vote to Sean Penn this year.

At least you’re guaranteed your own row at his movies.

Who had bets on Lily Allen for this week? Odds were vastly in favor of another Amy Winehouse meltdown, but when Lily Allen showed up at the Glamour Magazine awards with bright pink hair and that glistening, boozy glow, she quickly became the hammered, career plummeting favourite.

And sure not to disappoint, we can all enjoy Lily Allen’s victory speech, also known as the morning after regretful blog entry.

Lily Allen’s appearance at the Glamour Magazine Awards in London earlier this week confirmed that if anything is constant in this world, it’s that celebrities will continued to get hammered in public and have to be carried off by some burly bodyguard, or something.

Lily Allen arrived at the awards with hot pink hair and accepted a special award from the editor for her ‘multi-faceted’ career.

So, according to the editor of Glamour magazine, the many facets of Lily Allen’s career that merit awarding are a crap TV show, being pregnant, not being allowed into America even though the words on the Statue of Liberty say they’ll take all the people no one else wants, not being pregnant anymore, and belting out a song here and there.

Sometime after accepting her award for having lots of facets and stuff, Lily Allen had to be carried out of the party after having a few too many drinks. It’s okay, though. She’s real sorry about it. Honest, you can officially read about it on her official MySpace blog. She officially writes:

“… I’m putting my hands up, I got very drunk last night, too drunk. It’s not cool getting that drunk. Kids, drink responsibly or you’ll end up looking like this, not pretty!”

That’s right, kids. You drink too much and you’ll end up looking like Lily Allen. Maybe Lily Allen’s parents drank too much and that’s how Lily Allen ended up looking like Lily Allen. Yikes. That’s enough to frighten anyone into sobriety.

At yesterday’s Ivor Novello Awards, where we assume he won the Baldest Man To Have His Career Partially Resuscitated By A Drumming Monkey award, Phil Collins emotionally announced that he was retiring from the limelight to focus on raising his two young sons in Switzerland.

So now we’ll have to get used to a world without Phil Collins – a world where bad Disney cartoons about bears are left without a soundtrack, a world where Buster 2 will never materialise, and a world where both Noel Edmonds and Jeremy Clarkson will mope about in a fug of perpetual misery forever. So it’s not all bad, then.

This is turning into quite the week. First the Red Hot Chili Peppers announce their split – albeit temporarily – and now Phil Collins has decided to retire from performing as well. Quick, everyone close your eyes and concentrate as hard as you can – there’s obviously some sort of supernatural wish fulfillment thing going on here and we don’t want it to run out before we’ve got rid of The Kooks and Razorlight as well.

Anyway, back to Phil Collins. He’s been so much to so many people over the years – a beardy tit, a bald tit, a drumming tit, a singing tit, an acting tit, an emotionally immature tit, a tit in a rubbish band, a tit with a rubbish solo career, a Tory tit, a tax-dodging tit – that he’s become ingrained in the public consciousness, like a tick. Like a bald tick. A bald tick who only idiots like. That looks a bit like Bob Hoskins.

So trying to imagine a world without Phil Collins is almost impossible, at least until you realise that he released his last non-soundtrack, non-compilation album six years ago, that he’s lived in Switzerland for a decade and that he’s about as culturally relevant as a penny farthing made of turnips. Then it becomes surprisingly easy.

Nevertheless, Phil Collins announced his retirement while accepting his International Achievement prize at yesterday’s Ivor Novello awards in London. According to The Mirror:

The Genesis frontman was awarded the International Achievement gong and during an emotional speech said “the timing was appropriate” to stop performing as he had decided to concentrate on bringing up his two young sons in Switzerland. He joked the gorilla which played the drums in a TV chocolate advert to his hit In The Air Tonight, could take his place in Genesis. However, the 57-year-old said he would continue to write, adding: “Thank you very much and goodnight as it were.”

However, don’t let this vicious bald predator lull you into a false sense of security – Phil Collins has been threatening to retire for ages now, and yet he always seems to pop up again, whether it’s for a cartoon soundtrack or a sly Genesis reunion. So we shouldn’t relax too much yet, although his words did seem pretty final.

Other winners at the Ivor Novello awards included… oh, it’s no good. How could we possibly be able to think of anything else now that Phil Collins has decided to leave us? We’re heartbroken. Shocked and stunned and heartbroken and… no, wait, we were getting Phil Collins confused with Bob Hoskins again. Bob Hoskins isn’t retiring is he? No? Just Phil Collins? Oh, well in that case we’re alright with it.

Read more:

Phil Collins announces retirement at Ivor Novello Awards - Mirror

We love watching that Kobe Byrant shoot touchdowns and that guy Jessica Simpson is dating do really bad at footballing stuff when she’s watching the match. But just once instead of the quarterback yelling plays we’d like him to yell "Blue, Shimmy-two! Blue, Shimmy-two!", and see the entire offensive line bust into some dancing, boy band-style.

Well, we may be in luck because Justin Timberlake is slated to host the 16th annual ESPY awards this year on ESPN. It was a tough decision for the folks at ESPN, but this year clearly wasn’t the right time Clay Aiken. Go, JT!

The ESPYs are an annual awards show on ESPN that honour the best in professional sports over the past year. Last year LeBron James and Jimmy Kimmel hosted. LeBron James was obviously chosen for his athletic prowess, which made sense on the professional athlete side, and Jimmy Kimmel known for his fat man gut and beer-drinking prowess on the sports fan side. And who do they hire to host this year? Justin Timberlake. A spindly blonde guy that dances for a living and sings songs like Cry Me A River, which makes sense on no side.   

You may know Justin Timberlake from his hit song SexyBack (also known under the alternative title Bringing My Own Faux Sense of Appeal Back) but he’s also all over the hosting circuit. A regular at the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards, Justin recently inducted Madonkey, er, Madonna into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The man’s a hosting machine! But the ESPYs? That’s all a bit manly. Justin Timberlake doesn’t strike us as manliest man in the room. In fact, Justin Timberlake isn’t even the manliest man in a room full of WNBA players.

So what qualifies Justin Timberlake to be the host of an awards show for professional athletes? He’s a sports fan. No, no. Make that a sports junkie. Let's let Justin speak for himself:

“I’m very excited to be hosting the 16th edition of The ESPYs. I can’t wait for the day of the show as I’m truly a sports junkie. Since the last ESPYs, there have been amazing moments in sports and I’m looking forward to recapping all of them with ESPN’s diehard fans.”

There you have it, folks. Look for the ESPY’s on ESPN sometime in June, or something. In the meantime you can catch other qualified hosts such as Rosie O’Donnell hosting America’s Next Top Model, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel guest hosting The Martha Stewart Show.   

Read more:

Timberlake 'n sync with ESPY Awards, set to host – ABC11

Why? Well, as if having a top-rated TV show, a number one movie and a bunch of chart-topping albums, isn't enough, now it's been revealed that Miley Cyrus is going to host the CMT awards.

You heard correctly – Miley Cyrus is going to host this year's CMT awards. The world's third-biggest country and western-themed awards show. It doesn't get much bigger than that. Apart from the world's second-biggest country and western-themed awards show, or the world's first-biggest country and western-themed awards show. Or any other awards show at all. Is there no stopping this Miley Cyrus woman?

It's fair to say that Miley Cyrus currently has the level of ubiquity that you'd normally expect from a veteran movie star, or at least a Hollywood socialite with a borderline personality disorder and a history of extensive rehab visits. Everything that Miley Cyrus does turns to gold – her TV show, her live concerts, her albums, her movie, her semi-risque pouty mobile phone videos – and what awards show wouldn't want a slice of something that horrifyingly robotic?

Miley Cyrus cut her awards show teeth by becoming a presenter at Sunday's Oscars – although if you tried looking for Oscars clips on YouTube you might be under the impression that the show was basically six hours of nothing but Miley Cyrus grinning earnestly at a lectern – and now she's taking it one step further, by hosting the entire CMT awards in April, as the Associated Press reports:

Billy Ray Cyrus and daughter Miley will host and perform at the 2008 CMT Music Awards. The seventh annual awards show will air live April 14 on CMT from Belmont University's Curb Event Center. Alan Jackson, Brad Paisley, Carrie Underwood, Sugarland, Taylor Swift and Toby Keith will also be among the performers. "Miley and I are so excited to be hosting the CMT Music Awards," Cyrus said Tuesday in a statement. "We know it will be a fun-filled night with a lot of great music performances."

Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus together? What the the CMT awards organisers thinking? Everyone knows that when Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus get together, things are bound to end up with a stupefyingly inane country ballad duet about flying high on the wings of freedom or a charity-angering display of riding around in a car without a seatbelt.

Can the CMT awards live with that kind of knife-edge controversy? Can it? Can it really? Given that the CMT awards is mostly about giving hunks of metal to buck-toothed banjo players, we're not awfully sure it can.

But at least you know what you're getting by allowing Miley Cyrus to host an awards show. Months and months of hearing your children beg and blackmail you into spending more money than you earn on a ticket to a fifth-rate awards show for a style of music that you'd rather cut off your feet than listen to, all just so they can look at an unusually confident teenager say some dull words about cowboys for 30 seconds at a time, that's what.

Read more:

Miley, Billy Ray Cyrus Host CMT Awards – Associated Press 

Actually, that's a lie. The 'Angelina Jolie: is she pregnant or isn't she pregnant' debate hasn't been anything like a talking point at all because the answer is yes, Angelina Jolie is very obviously pregnant and only an idiot would question it.

And to make it clearer, Angelina Jolie was seen at an awards show this weekend in a tiny dress with her belly poking out. So it's either pregnancy or irritable bowel syndrome; something we've chosen to uncover by hooking a secret microphone up to Angelina Jolie's arse and measuring how loud and messy-sounding all her farts are. Honestly, you can thank us later.

Of all the current crop of pregnant celebrities, none have been easier to diagnose than Angelina Jolie. Sure, Halle Berry and Jessica Alba may have seen their breasts expand like someone's working them with a footpump, but it's not exactly rare to see actresses suddenly jump bra sizes without warning. But Angelina Jolie has a different pregnancy tell.

You see, when Angelina Jolie gets pregnant, she stops being so thin that it's actually a little distressing to look at her and becomes normal-sized again. So, yes, everyone has known that Angelina Jolie is pregnant for a while, but this is the first time that she's made the news seem anywhere near official.

You see, Angelina Jolie turned up to an awards show this weekend and, for the first time since Brad Pitt knocked her up, she wasn't covered in a four-man tent to disguise it, as E! Online reports:

There it was – Angelina Jolie's baby bump! She did nothing to hide it today at the Film Independent's Spirit Awards in Santa Monica. No loose-fitting clothing. No holding oversize handbags over her midsection. Not even a coat. She wore a body-hugging black dress along with matching Jimmy Choo heels.

We should point out that it's a rare break from tradition of Angelina Jolie to show off her baby-bump in such a brazen way. Usually when she gets pregnant, Angelina Jolie likes to go to a dusty African country and pretend that the fertile earth knocked her up, to make the baby feel more at home with its adopted multinational counterparts. 

But now that Angelina Jolie's pregnancy is out in the open for everyone to see, we should really ask ourselves why. Is the bump getting too hard to cover? Is Angelina trying to court more paparazzi to hang around her house so she can get them arrested? Or, as we suspect, is this Angelina Jolie's way to make sure she gets an even bigger payday when she sells her baby photos to a magazine?

If that's the case, then it's probably clever of her to get in early. As Christina Aguilera's recent deal showed, nobody gives a shit about celebrity baby photos any more. And even though Angelina Jolie is pregnant with twins, that's not such a big deal either thanks to Jennifer Lopez's twins and Jessica Alba's imminent twins.

So, by getting her pregnancy announcement out in the open this early, Angelina Jolie has given herself enough time to dream up her own gimmick to keep the magazine readers happy by the time her babies are born. What that gimmick will be we're not sure, although we have heard rumours that Angelina plans to pay a gynaecologist to stitch little tiny top hats onto her unborn babies' heads prenatally to make them look quite posh.

Read more:

Angelina's Baby Bump Debut – E! Online 

In other news, some actors think that Daniel Day-Lewis is quite good at acting.

The SAG awards took place last night, and because it's just about the only awards show where nobody will get booed by the people who write Smallville just for attending, almost every single actor in the world turned up. And by now you'll already be able to guess who won.

The writers' strike has made a right old arsepickle out of awards season this year, and for that we'll be eternally grateful. Because the Screen Actors Guild – the SAG, if you will – officially supports the WGA (Writers Guild Of America. Do keep up), it has banned its members from turning up to anything that the WGA wrinkles its nose at. So the Golden Globes turned into the world's dullest press conference, the People's Choice Awards turned into a retrospective clips show about Drew Barrymore and the Oscars are already flatlining.

But, thanks to a contractual loophole, one awards show that SAG did allow actors to attend was last night's SAG awards. And, knowing that this might be their only chance to be pictured in a newspaper looking massively overdressed and buffed to within an inch of their lives on a red carpet, just about every actor alive decided to turn up.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were there, Tom Cruise was there, Daniel Day-Lewis was there, Cate Blanchett was there, Eva Longoria was there, that annoying scrawny woman from Grey's Anatomy was there, her off Will & Grace was there, Burt Reynolds was there – and by our calculations we're pretty sure that those are all the actors alive at the moment.

But what about the SAG awards themselves? Surely, with the world treating the show as a kind of substitute Oscars, SAG could really pull the rug out from everyone's feet and award trophies to some refreshingly left-field choices. Or perhaps it'd just lob awards at the actors everyone expected instead. Guess.

The winner of the SAG award for Best Male Actor In A Leading Role went to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood – adding to his Golden Globe, his LA Film Critics award, his New York Film Critics award and his third runner-up prize in the Speen Parish Council summer fete's Guess The Weight Of The Cake contest. No Country For Old Men also won two SAG Awards – Best Ensemble and Best Supporting Actor – adding to its already impressive award tally. And Julie Christie also won for her role in that film about the old lady, just like she has everywhere else.

And, since the SAG awards also honour television performances, we should add that The Sopranos won stuff, 30 Rock won stuff and The Office won stuff. But nobody really cares about any of that because it's just TV.

And that's all. So long as the writers' strike continues it's just this and the Grammys. And, you know, if the WGA wants to come over here and picket the Brits as a favour to us next month, we'd appreciate it.

Read more:

Stars Seize Their Chance to Shine at SAG Awards – New York Times 

Although it has already won a bunch of awards already, There Will Be Blood is still gaining momentum all the time, picking up a handful of awards at Saturday night's National Society Of Film Critics awards in New York for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Cinematography. Now, the continuing success of There Will Be Blood - along with that of its rivals No Country For Old Men and Into The Wild – might make it look as if I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry has been edged out of the Oscars running, but we still live in eternal hope that Blake Clark gets the credit he deserves for imbuing Crazy Homeless Man with such dignified pathos.

So it looks like awards season might be dead on its feet already thanks to the WGA strike banning everyone from going to the Golden Globes, but the clever kids at the National Society Of Film Critics knows a simple way around that. Instead of hosting a glitzy gala evening full of stars dressed up to the nines heartily congratulating themselves on being able to make films about important things like war and malformed babies, the National Society Of Film Critics instead just gathers its members up in a restaurant and lets them shout at each other until some winners get decided.

And the National Society Of Film Critics awards are even more refreshing because they have absolutely no bearing on the outcome of the Oscars either. Like last year when it decided that Pan's Labyrinth was the best film and everyone else was fawning over The Departed, for example, or any of the other times when the National Society Of Film Critics got it wrong that we can't be bothered to find out about at the moment.

That's good news for us, but rubbish news for There Will Be Blood, because it swept the board at Saturday's National Society Of Film Critics awards so probably won't get a sniff come Oscar night. There Will Be Blood managed to win awards for best picture, best director, best cinematography and best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis' compelling portrayal of a man who talks quite slowly in an unusual voice, adding to the tally of awards that already includes an LA Film Critics trophy and a New York Film Critics trophy.

Apart from that, though, the National Society Of Film Critics awards went just as you'd expect. Julie Christie won an award because she played a woman with a degenerative mental condition in a film, Cate Blanchett won an award because she played an old musician in a vaguely biopic-ish film, No End In Sight won an award because it's a documentary about the Iraq war and Casey Affleck won an award because it was getting late and everyone had been drinking a little bit by the time they got round to choosing the Best Supporting Actor prize.

We expect.

Read more:

National Critics Draw Blood – E! Online 

And – out of nowhere considering the direction that awards season seems to be going in – Atonement has scored more Golden Globe nominations than anyone else. In all, Atonement has scored seven Golden Globe nominations – among them Best Actress for Keira Knightley, Best Actor for James McAvoy and Best Director for Joe Wright. Although the competition will be harder than ever at a big awards show like the Golden Globes, Atonement is expected to win at least one trophy – either the Best Annoyingly Twittish Film About People Who Speak With Accents Like Dentists Drills or the By Christ Love Put Them Away For Once award for excessive and repeated nudity, both of which we've just made up.

In an awards season packed with all kinds of minuscule organisations trying to hurl their tuppence worth to the top of the pile, the Golden Globes are one of the more reassuringly large awards to be handed out. And they don't just concentrate on serious movies, either – Golden Globes are also handed out to TV shows and comedies, too, which means that Hugh Laurie and Ricky Gervais can get all dressed up and temporarily feel slightly more important than they have any reason to be. 

And you probably think you know all about awards season by now, don't you? You've seen how There Will Be Blood has won one award and how No Country For Old Men has won a couple of others, so you think they'll have the Oscars sewn up, don't you? Well, you're wrong because the Golden Globe nominations have been announced and they show that the British are coming, albeit the small section of the British with voices that sound like yappy little dogs discussing foie gras and fox hunting.

Atonement - the rah-rah British movie about atoning and stuff – is leading the pack when it comes to Golden Globe nominations, with seven nods, for Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Score.

Charlie Wilson's War, which we've been led to believe is a version of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip but with Tom Hanks talking about war instead of Matthew Perry implausibly imagining friends that are really himself with the letters of his name all jumbled up, has come second with five nominations. And making up the rest of the pack are all the other films that you'd expect to be making up the rest of the pack if you've been paying attention.

The Golden Globes are highly important, because some bloke who works for a company that knows about this kind of thing told Bloomberg as much:

"The golden globes are a barometer for where the critical acclaim is going, the films that are ultimately going to be considered by the academy."

See? You want a full list of Golden Globe nominations now, don't you. Can't you just wait until January 13 when the bloody things are handed out? What are you, David Duchovny or something?

Read more:

Golden Globe Nominations – Golden Globes 

And that's not just our opinion, either – all the film critics in Los Angeles seem to think so, too. Last night was the LA Film Critics Association's turn to heap their shovel of opinion onto an already-boring awards season, and it's named There Will Be Blood, the Paul Thomas Anderson drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a rich man who speaks slowly and leaves lots of pauses in sentences where you wouldn't really expect them to, as the best film of the year. All in all at the annual vote, There Will Be Blood won four awards and came runner-up in three other categories, blowing the competition out of the water.

Don't worry, I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, we're sure you're still in with a chance somewhere, and we'll keep wearing your garish promotional baseball cap until you get the recognition you deserve.

Los Angeles is a city built on movies. Well, movies and the 90 billion photographers whose sole aim in life is to take a picture of Britney Spears' genitals. And since LA is a movie city, it's only right that the LA film critics should have their own awards ceremony where, say, the film critics of Cockermouth shouldn't. Cockermouth isn't a movie city. Cockermouth is a small town in Cumbria with two cycle shops and a slightly rude-sounding name.

And when better for the LA Film Critics Association to announce the winners of their awards than right at the start of awards season before the average citizen gets so overwhelmed by all the little groups and organisations deciding what films they like that they beat themselves around the head with a boot to kick-start some kind of self-induced coma?

So that's what's happened – the LA Film Critics Association announced the winners of its annual awards last night, and it was an incredible night for There Will Be Blood, the admittedly impressive-looking new movie by Paul Thomas Anderson. As well as winning Best Movie, There Will Be Blood also picked up Best Director, Best Production Design and Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis, whose role as a grumpy old oil baron is Very Important because he doesn't make many films any more and he leaves a lot of big pauses between his words in the trailer.

And There Will Be Blood could have won even more, getting second-place nods for cinematography, music and screenplay. All of this LA Film Critics Association love has shunted There Will Be Blood out to become an Oscar front-runner along with No Country For Old Men and, when some of the Academy see us in our natty baseball cap, I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry.

Other winners announced by the LA Film Critics Association included Romanian bag of fun 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days and buddy-cop movie The Diving Bell And The Butterfly. It might be that you're more used to these titles by the time the Oscars come around, it might be that you're not, or it might be that even the sound of someone saying the word 'Oscars' to you will literally make your brain explode because it's all you've heard for three months solid. Tenner says it's the latter.

Read more:

L.A. film critics go for `Blood' – LA Daily News 

The National Board of Review yesterday voted No Country For Old Men as the best film of 2007, the first high-profile movie awards to be handed out in what's due to become a predictably tiresome three-month awards season. But that's not the only reason why the National Board of Review awards are significant – they've also ensured that everyone will be so sick of the babble surrounding No Country For Old Men by February that it doesn't even stand a sniff of a chance of winning an Oscar any more.

There's something uniquely depressing about awards season, you know. Over the next few weeks and months, about a billion groups and organisations will get together to decide what films were good in 2007, and each result will be pored over an analysed to see if it gives any indication of who'll win an Oscar. Then on Oscar night itself – bam – people just talk about what a lovely dress Keira Knightley is wearing.

Why are we rabbiting on about something that's not even starting for another few months? Because awards season is officially here, thanks to the National Board of Review dishing out its awards in front of everyone yesterday. Oh, don't pretend that you've never heard of the National Board of Review.

The National Board of Review is the perfect organisation to hand out movie awards, because its ranks are made up of historians, students, educators and a few other people who probably just turned up to escape the drizzle. Last year, the National Board of Review gave the best movie prize to that Clint Eastwood film about the war that you never got round to watch, but what about this year?

Well, this year the Best Movie award went to the Coen brother's No Country For Old Men – which also picked up Best Ensemble Cast and Best Adapted Screenplay – ensuring that it won't win an Oscar because the National Board of Review and the Oscars haven't agreed on what the best movie is for eight years in a row.

The National Board of Review also voted for its top ten movies of the year – which are The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bucket List, Into the Wild, Juno, The Kite Runner, Lars and the Real Girl, Michael Clayton and Sweeney Todd, or as we know them Dull Cowboy Film, Rah-Rah Britishness, Herky Jerky Action Film, Jack Nicholson's Got Cancer, Obligatory Sean Penn Nod, Teenage Pregnancy, Something About Kites, I Fuck Dolls, George Clooney Looks At A Horse and Sweeney Todd.

Finally, just in case you're interested, here's the full list of National Board of Review movie award winners. Alternatively you could just wait until the end of the week when the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle do exactly the same thing, or you could hide under a blanket until February when the Oscars are finished. Save us some room.

Best Film: No Country for Old Men

Best Director: Tim Burton, Sweeney Todd

Best Actor: George Clooney, Michael Clayton

Best Actress: Julie Christie, Away From Her

Best Supporting Actor: Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Best Supporting Actress: Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone

Best Foreign Film: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Best Documentary: Body of War

Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille

Best Ensemble Cast: No Country for Old Men

Breakthrough Performance by an Actor: Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild

Breakthrough Performance by an Actress: Ellen Page, Juno

Best Directorial Debut: Ben Affleck, Gone Baby Gone

Best Original Screenplay (tie): Diablo Cody, Juno and Nancy Oliver, Lars and the Real Girl

Best Adapted Screenplay: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men

Read more:

Board Of Review Picks No Country – Los Angeles Times