The remaining winners of Los Angeles Film Critics Association 2010 awards have been announced, and there’s another head-scratcher to ponder — Kim Hye-ja, star of the Brian De Palma-like South Korean potboiler Mother, has been handed their Best Actress award.

Mother star Kim Hye-ja, winner of LAFCA’s Best Actress award.

This is “interesting” and outside the safety zone in a cool way, I suppose. But it also seems like a deliberate provocation to the status quo for the sake of deliberately provoking the status quo. I saw Mother at Cannes ’09 — neither it nor Kim Hey-Ja’s performance were anything to have major kittens over. She’s fine in a broadly theatrical, suffering-drama-queen way, but c’mon.

LAFCA has a oddballish reputation to uphold, I realize, but you just know they were saying to themselves “why do we have to fall in line for Natalie Portman?…let’s go with somebody fringe!”

Winters Bone‘s Jennifer Lawrence was the Best Actress runner-up.

LAFCA also went with the Prophet guy, Niels Astrup, for Best Supporting Actor.

The Social Network won Best Picture, of course, but Carlos was the runner-up. And sincere cheers to LAFCA for splitting their Best Director award between The Social Network‘s David Fincher and Carlos‘ Olivier Assayas. Colin Firth won the org’s Best Actor award for The King’s Speech. Carlos won also for Best Foreign Language Film. And Tiny Furniture‘s Lena Dunham won the New Generation award.