The Indiana Film Journalists Association has given its Best Film award to The Social Network, and their Best Screenplay award to TSN‘s Aaron Sorkin. Inception‘s Chris Nolan won for Best Director, Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman was named Best Actress, James Franco won Best Actor for 127 Hours, Hailee Steinfeld took Best Supporting Actress for True Grit (size of her role is meaningless — the fact that she’s young and brand-new means she’s a supporting actress…period) and The Fighter‘s Christian Bale was named Best Supporting Actor.

With The King’s Speech and Kids Are All Right Best Actress contender Annette Bening having been blanked so far by the NBR, D.C.-area critics, Boston Film Critics, NYFCO and LAFCA film awards (and with today’s New York Film Critics Circle voters expected to bypass them also), it was fair to ask last night if they were going to be nominated by anyone or anything except by the chummy, highly political SAG and AMPAS…or whether it was time to admit they’ve been over-hyped all along.

Do I hear a cavalry charge? Hold on…listen! Tah-da-dat-da-dat-da-DAT-da-DAT-da-dah-dah-da-dah-da-DAT-da-DAT-da-dahhh! It’s the nominations from the Broadcast Film Critics Association — i.e., the Critics Choice awards — thundering over a ridge, horse hooves kicking up a cloud of dust…saved! Because they’re carrying 11 nominations for The King’s Speech (including Best Picture, Best Actor/Colin Firth, Best Supporting Actor/Geoffrey Rush, Best Director/Tom Hooper, etc.) and 4 nominations for The Kids Are All Right, including a Best Actress nomination for Bening.

The biggest BFCA winner of all is Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan with an “unprecedented” 12 nominations. True Grit matches Speech‘s 11 nominations while Inception got 10 nominations and The Social Network accumulated 9.

One huge note of regret: Another Year‘s Lesley Manville has been shut out of BFCA Best Actress contention. The lady is too great an actress and has given too searing a performance for any further shut-outs to occur. Please — let’s not regard this as a bellwether.

The Critics Choice winners will be announced at the Hollywood Palladium on Friday, 1.14.11 at 9 pm, and will be broadcast again (for the fourth year in a row) by VH1. It will also be the first year the show will also be aired internationally.

This morning a critic in a discussion board pointed out that at least three of the six actresses nominated by the BFCA for Best Actress received on-screen oral pleasuring in their respective films — Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right, Natalie Portman in Black Swan and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine.

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.

“I surrender to Social Network inevitability,” a critic friend just wrote in an email. “A juggernaut, apparently.” One of the indicators he was referring to were the awards announced today by the New York Film Critics Online (which should of course be called the New York Online Film Critics, or NYOFC). They went with Network for three top awards — Best Picture, Best Director to David Fincher and Best Screenplay to Aaron Sorkin.

James Franco won Best Actor for his performance in 127 Hours , and Natalie Portman, of course, won Best Actress for her performance in Black Swan. Christian Bale won Best Supporting Actor for The Fighter, and his costar Melissa Leo won for Best Supporting Actress.

Noomi Repace‘s one-facial-expression performance (i.e., glaring rage) in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo won a Breakthrough Performer award? Really? Company Man director John Wells won the org’s Hotshot New Director award, or whatever they call it. The Kids Are All Right, totally shut out so far by other critics groups, was given an Ensemble Cast award.

The NYFCO’s Best Documentary award went to Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop. Their Best Foreign Language Film trophy went to I Am Love. Toy Story 3 won for Best Animated Feature. “Matty” Labatique‘s cinematography won for Black Swan. Darren Aronofsky‘s film also won for Best Film Music or Score.

Commentary from an NYFCO memer: “Best Picture was a first-round slamdunk, as was screenplay and director (Aronofsky was a close second). Natalie Portman also won by a substantial margin but Breakthrough Performer Noomi Rapace fared well in the actress category.

“The closest races were foreign language, doc and animated where I Am Love won in the third round by one point over The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Toy Story 3 beat The Illusionist by just two points in the first round. Exit through the Gift Shop just beat Waiting for Superman for doc in a third round.

“Bale and Leo were both first-round wins but supporting were the only categories where The Fighter had significant showing. Neither True Grit nor The Fighter made NYFCO’s top 10…. and the oddly absent actor that no one nominated, not one person? Robert Duvall. Might want to reassess the actor and move Jesse Eisenberg into that position.”

Two somewhat curious acting awards have happened today. First the Boston Society of Film Critics give their Best Supporting Actress award to Juliette Lewis, and now the Los Angeles Film Critics Association has given its Best Supporting Actor to Niels Arestrup, the scowling, white-haired, chain-smoking prison boss in Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet.

Niels Arestrup, winner of LAFCA’s Best Supporting Actor award for his work in A Prophet, is the snarly old buzzard on the right; A Prophet costar Tahar Rahim is on the left.

Again — nobody in my realm pre-approved this in any way, shape or form. Secondly, Arestrup is quite effective in the film, but his performance is not what anyone would call “oh, wow!” stupendous. He plays a French criminal-class guy in typical French-criminal-class fashion. He’s gruff and blustery — an aging barking dog who’s trying to hide the fact that he’s terrified of losing his hold on power. And always with the cigarettes, the cigarettes, the fucking cigarettes. It’s a very oddball call.

What happened to Christian Bale in The Fighter? What happened to one of the Social Network guys, Andrew Garfield or Justin Timberlake? What happened to Bill Murray in Get Low? The King’s Speech costar Geoffrey Rush was the runner-up.

Niels Arestrup?

HE approves of Animal Kingdom‘s Jacki Weaver winning for Best Supporting Actress, and would have also high-fived the runner-up, Ghost Writer costar Olivia Williams, if she had prevailed. LAFCA’s Best Screenplay award went to Aaron Sorkin for “The Social Network. The Best Documentary Award went to Last Train Home, which I never even saw. The Best Doc runner-up, Exit Through the Gift Shop, should have taken it.

The Best Cinematography award went to Black Swan‘s Matthew (i.e., “Matty” if you’re talking to HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny) Libatique, with True Grit‘s Roger Deakins coming in second.

The Best Music Score award was split between Ghost Writer‘s Alexandre Desplat and The Social Network‘s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The Best Production Design award went to Inception‘s Guy Hendrix Dyas with Eve Stewart coming in second for her work on The King’s Speech.

Typepad log-in problems have blocked would-be commenters over the last two or three days, but I think things are okay now. It had something to do (idiotically) with the server clock being off due to the time change. In any case, Film Society of Lincoln Center associate program director Scott Foundas tried to respond two days ago to blogger reactions to the LAFCA voting, but was blocked by the malfunction. Here’s what he wrote:

“[LAFCA Best Supporting Actor winner] Niels Arestrup did not ‘exhaust’ his Oscar eligibility last year. In fact, he was never — and never will be — eligible for an Oscar because of the current Academy rule (much revised over the years) stating that any film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film can not be nominated in a subsequent year in any other categories, regardless of when it actually opens in the U.S. Had A Prophet been released for a qualifying run in 2009, then Arestrup would have been eligible at the 2010 Oscars. Had the film not been nominated for Foreign Film at the 2010 Oscars, then Arestrup would have a shot in the spring.

“This is the sort of thing one would assume would be common knowledge amongst such an august group of awards-season ‘experts,’ but then we all know the old adage about making assumptions…

“As for the suggestion that neither Arestrup nor Kim Hye-Ja will surface again during the remaining awards season, ‘just as it was the first and last we heard of LAFCA’s 2009 best actress Yolande Moreau,’ I suppose that was true of Moreau if one discounts Moreau’s similar wins at the National Society of Film Critics, the Cesar Awards [French Oscars], and even that hotbed of obscurantist cinephilia, the Newport Beach Film Festival.

“At the very least, you can expect to see Arestrup (who also already won a Cesar for his performance) and Kim’s names in the mix in the annual nationwide polls of film critics conducted by The Village Voice, Film Comment and Indiewire. Look back to the reviews these films received at the time of their release, and you will find that the performances in question — and the movies that contain them — were among the best received of the year.

“Sorry that the companies responsible for releasing the films in question didn’t paper the pages of Variety with ‘For Your Consideration’ ads or organize any cocktail soirees to parade their talent before the Oscar-blogging cognoscenti, thereby instantly ruling them out as contenders in the minds of some. (Hey, they’re no Frankie and Alice.) The job of film critics, however, remains to review movies, and not just the hype surrounding them.”

Typepad log-in problems have blocked would-be commenters over the last two or three days, but I think things are okay now. It had something to do (idiotically) with the server clock being off due to the time change. In any case, Film Society of Lincoln Center associate program director Scott Foundas tried to respond two days ago to blogger reactions to the LAFCA voting, but was blocked by the malfunction. Here’s what he wrote:

“[LAFCA Best Supporting Actor winner] Niels Arestrup did not ‘exhaust’ his Oscar eligibility last year. In fact, he was never — and never will be — eligible for an Oscar because of the current Academy rule (much revised over the years) stating that any film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film can not be nominated in a subsequent year in any other categories, regardless of when it actually opens in the U.S. Had A Prophet been released for a qualifying run in 2009, then Arestrup would have been eligible at the 2010 Oscars. Had the film not been nominated for Foreign Film at the 2010 Oscars, then Arestrup would have a shot in the spring.

“This is the sort of thing one would assume would be common knowledge amongst such an august group of awards-season ‘experts,’ but then we all know the old adage about making assumptions…

“As for the suggestion that neither Arestrup nor Kim Hye-Ja will surface again during the remaining awards season, ‘just as it was the first and last we heard of LAFCA’s 2009 best actress Yolande Moreau,’ I suppose that was true of Moreau if one discounts Moreau’s similar wins at the National Society of Film Critics, the Cesar Awards [French Oscars], and even that hotbed of obscurantist cinephilia, the Newport Beach Film Festival.

“At the very least, you can expect to see Arestrup (who also already won a Cesar for his performance) and Kim’s names in the mix in the annual nationwide polls of film critics conducted by The Village Voice, Film Comment and Indiewire. Look back to the reviews these films received at the time of their release, and you will find that the performances in question — and the movies that contain them — were among the best received of the year.

“Sorry that the companies responsible for releasing the films in question didn’t paper the pages of Variety with ‘For Your Consideration’ ads or organize any cocktail soirees to parade their talent before the Oscar-blogging cognoscenti, thereby instantly ruling them out as contenders in the minds of some. (Hey, they’re no Frankie and Alice.) The job of film critics, however, remains to review movies, and not just the hype surrounding them.”

Typepad log-in problems have blocked would-be commenters over the last two or three days, but I think things are okay now. It had something to do (idiotically) with the server clock being off due to the time change. In any case, Film Society of Lincoln Center associate program director Scott Foundas tried to respond two days ago to blogger reactions to the LAFCA voting, but was blocked by the malfunction. Here’s what he wrote:

“[LAFCA Best Supporting Actor winner] Niels Arestrup did not ‘exhaust’ his Oscar eligibility last year. In fact, he was never — and never will be — eligible for an Oscar because of the current Academy rule (much revised over the years) stating that any film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film can not be nominated in a subsequent year in any other categories, regardless of when it actually opens in the U.S. Had A Prophet been released for a qualifying run in 2009, then Arestrup would have been eligible at the 2010 Oscars. Had the film not been nominated for Foreign Film at the 2010 Oscars, then Arestrup would have a shot in the spring.

“This is the sort of thing one would assume would be common knowledge amongst such an august group of awards-season ‘experts,’ but then we all know the old adage about making assumptions…

“As for the suggestion that neither Arestrup nor Kim Hye-Ja will surface again during the remaining awards season, ‘just as it was the first and last we heard of LAFCA’s 2009 best actress Yolande Moreau,’ I suppose that was true of Moreau if one discounts Moreau’s similar wins at the National Society of Film Critics, the Cesar Awards [French Oscars], and even that hotbed of obscurantist cinephilia, the Newport Beach Film Festival.

“At the very least, you can expect to see Arestrup (who also already won a Cesar for his performance) and Kim’s names in the mix in the annual nationwide polls of film critics conducted by The Village Voice, Film Comment and Indiewire. Look back to the reviews these films received at the time of their release, and you will find that the performances in question — and the movies that contain them — were among the best received of the year.

“Sorry that the companies responsible for releasing the films in question didn’t paper the pages of Variety with ‘For Your Consideration’ ads or organize any cocktail soirees to parade their talent before the Oscar-blogging cognoscenti, thereby instantly ruling them out as contenders in the minds of some. (Hey, they’re no Frankie and Alice.) The job of film critics, however, remains to review movies, and not just the hype surrounding them.”

Typepad log-in problems have blocked would-be commenters over the last two or three days, but I think things are okay now. It had something to do (idiotically) with the server clock being off due to the time change. In any case, Film Society of Lincoln Center associate program director Scott Foundas tried to respond two days ago to blogger reactions to the LAFCA voting, but was blocked by the malfunction. Here’s what he wrote:

“[LAFCA Best Supporting Actor winner] Niels Arestrup did not ‘exhaust’ his Oscar eligibility last year. In fact, he was never — and never will be — eligible for an Oscar because of the current Academy rule (much revised over the years) stating that any film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film can not be nominated in a subsequent year in any other categories, regardless of when it actually opens in the U.S. Had A Prophet been released for a qualifying run in 2009, then Arestrup would have been eligible at the 2010 Oscars. Had the film not been nominated for Foreign Film at the 2010 Oscars, then Arestrup would have a shot in the spring.

“This is the sort of thing one would assume would be common knowledge amongst such an august group of awards-season ‘experts,’ but then we all know the old adage about making assumptions…

“As for the suggestion that neither Arestrup nor Kim Hye-Ja will surface again during the remaining awards season, ‘just as it was the first and last we heard of LAFCA’s 2009 best actress Yolande Moreau,’ I suppose that was true of Moreau if one discounts Moreau’s similar wins at the National Society of Film Critics, the Cesar Awards [French Oscars], and even that hotbed of obscurantist cinephilia, the Newport Beach Film Festival.

“At the very least, you can expect to see Arestrup (who also already won a Cesar for his performance) and Kim’s names in the mix in the annual nationwide polls of film critics conducted by The Village Voice, Film Comment and Indiewire. Look back to the reviews these films received at the time of their release, and you will find that the performances in question — and the movies that contain them — were among the best received of the year.

“Sorry that the companies responsible for releasing the films in question didn’t paper the pages of Variety with ‘For Your Consideration’ ads or organize any cocktail soirees to parade their talent before the Oscar-blogging cognoscenti, thereby instantly ruling them out as contenders in the minds of some. (Hey, they’re no Frankie and Alice.) The job of film critics, however, remains to review movies, and not just the hype surrounding them.”