Forget Those Other Film Awards

You've waited patiently enough, right? And you're tired of what Addison DeWitt calls "that film society," which thinks the pudgy and generic Walk the Line is a triumph of editing and the smudgy faces of Cinderella Man an exemplar of on-screen makeup? Or are you just ready for another list of equal and opposite biases, waving a flag for the unsung, and sometimes for the ballyhooed, and occasionally for the widely reviled?

O, lucky day! Here are the Nick's Flick Picks Honorees for 2005, the one (imaginary) black-tie event where Terrence Howard and Todd Solondz are seated together, where the (imaginary) papparazzi crane for the best red-carpet action shots of Hippolyte Girardot and Juliette Welfling, where Best Sound is about dexterity and not merely decibels, and where everyone (imaginarily) goes home happy, because no one ever wins!

Top Ten of 2005

Commentary will follow, but for now, they are...



Nearest misses: Capote, Tropical Malady, Last Days, Murderball, and Wolf Creek.

A Word About Best Lists

These are already starting to pop up all over: keep up with GreenCine Daily and OscarWatch and you'll know when all the major critics check in.

Mini-minor critic that I am, I'm hoping to have a Top 10 list posted for the year by around the first week of January. Of course, one always hopes to have seen everything and, without a press card or any other means of keeping up, one never has. The only films left which I refuse to make a Top 10 without seeing are: Brokeback Mountain, Kings and Queen, Munich, The New World, Sometimes in April, and Wolf Creek. Don't give me guff about April: I know it only aired on HBO, but it played the Berlinale, and if Hollywood can't Bring It a little better than it did this year, I'm all over making room for strong cable TV by big-time directors like Raoul Peck. And don't give me guff about Wolf Creek, either, because it has superb buzz, and I'm all about the well-made horror; f'rinstance, even in an exceptional year like last year, no way I wasn't making room for Dawn of the Dead.

Given where I'll be in the next two weeks, I'm also hoping to catch Down to the Bone, Memoirs of a Geisha, Mrs. Henderson Presents, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and TransAmerica, but—call me prejudiced—I'll consider my Top 10 pretty safe if I haven't. I'd love to reserve judgment till Caché and Match Point cross my path, but I'm worried that won't be for a while.

And finally, as I'm surveying my current lists of five in the acting divisions for the Nick's Flick Picks Honorees, I'm noting that the 20 performances hail from 18 different movies. Without even trying to spread the wealth on purpose. Proof in my eyes that 2005 was all about the buried treasures in farflung and often inconsistent movies, rather than the outta-the-park home runs. (Again, though, those last movies to come could change all of this.)

I'm Not a Sister, But I'm Back in the Habit

When you have the fortune to see two great movies in a row, and you're trying to recover your review-writing mojo, why not write them both up? This latest review has been brought to you by Theo Angelopoulos' Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow, and as you'll read, if you haven't heard of that one, it's not your fault. But do seek it out. (It will help of course, when a DVD release is ever announced for this two-year-old film, which only hit metropolitan American screens in September.)