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.

Read more:

Coen brothers add to awards haul - BBC 

No Country For Old Men, the new movie by the Coen brothers, is quite good – and we know this because a bunch of dusty old historians just said so.

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