Last night the BFCA’s VH1/Critics Choice Awards saluted No Country for Old Men as Best Picture, that film’s Joel and Ethan Coen as Best Director, There Will Be Blood‘s Daniel Day-Lewis as Best Actor, and Away From Her‘s Julie Christie as Best Actress.

Other awards: Best Supporting Actor — Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men. Best Supporting actress — Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone. (The return of the 33 and 1/3 vinyl record that skips says “Amy Ryan, Amy Ryan, Amy Ryan”….a game of follow-the-pack, pure and simple.) Best Ensemble Award: Hairspray. (Really? Given all the great ensmeble casts we saw this year, including the Superbad guys?) Best Writer: Diablo Cody, Juno. Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille.
Best Young Actor: Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, The Kite Runner. (A political attaboy and a we’re-with-you! award because Mahmoodzada and his family were forced to move from Afghanistan due to fears that The Kite Runner might bring reprisals upon them from Taliban sympathizers.) Best Young Actress: Nikki Blonsky, Hairspray. (I saw the moment when the Botero-like Blonsky won — her “oh my god!” screaming was bridge-and-tunnel gauche, and if she doesn’t Jenny Craig herself down to a more reasonable proportion she’ll be shortening her lifespan. She’s a medicine ball. If Mike Huckabee can do it, so can she.)
Best Comedy Movie: Juno. (It may be the best dramedy, but the best flat-out comedy of the year was Superbad. The BFCA voters just want to attach themselves to the Juno train because it’s “well-loved” and, as of last week, starting to make a whole lot of money.) Best Family Film (live action): Enchanted. Best Made-for-TV Movie: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Best Foreign Language Feature: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. (A good film, but 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is a masterpiece.)
Best Song: “Falling Slowly”, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, from Once. Best Composer: Jonny Greenwood, There Will Be Blood. Best Documentary: Sicko. Joel Siegel Award: Don Cheadle.
Oh, and way to go to the BFCA webmaster who hasn’t updated the site with last night’s winners and hasn’t even added photos. Get around to it eventually. Have lunch first. Don’t sweat it.

L.A. Times guy Rene Lynch is reporting that two significant Golden Globes parties — HBO and Warner Bros./In Style — have pulled the plug, and that the other big parties are expected to “follow suit.” So the whole thing is kaputski. The ’08 Globes will be a press conference, a one-day news cycle and that’s all. Phffft.

Ten months shy of a 40th anniversary. The realism — crashing car metal, wild sideway skids, flying hubcaps — is awesome. The superb hand-held camerawork and knowing it’s absolutely real (as far as that concept goes) is half the fun. That even the high-level fakery that David Fincher used in Zodiac (which you can’t spot) isn’t part of it. Seen it 20 times; ready for another 20.

“The media is either at your feet or at your throat.” — MSNBC commentator Pat Buchanan speaking earlier this afternoon during a discussion of the media pile-on that Hillary Clinton is now suffering through. Deservedly, I would add.

A couple of hours ago the Hollywood Foreign Press association officially confirmed that the 1.13 Golden Globes awards ceremony has been scrapped. Instead a news conference will be aired at 6 pm Pacific to announce the winners in 25 film and TV categories, to be covered live by NBC. And as the clock ticks, the town wonders — what will become of the Oscars if a WGA strike settlement doesn’t happen?

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the Rosemary’s Baby speculation in Andrew Morton‘s Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography, to wit: that Suri Cruise is actually the daughter of the late L. Ron Hubbard as a result of Katie Holmes having been “impregnated with Hubbard’s frozen sperm.”

This is one of those rumors that sounds so deranged, it’s classic. It’s like something out of a horror film. It made me imagine the Scientology fertilization ceremony in which Holmes receives Hubbard’s seed, the high officials wearing silk robes and chanting like they do in that orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut. This rumor, I feel, is “better” — more vivid, more imaginative — than Richard Gere‘s gerbil, better than the body of Walt Disney being in cryogenic cold storage…it belongs to the ages.
Morton doesn’t claim the story is actually true. He’s said that Scientology insiders are muttering about it, whatever that means. Probably nothing.

Photos from that Ludivine Sagnier French Playboy photo spread are now online. Thanks to both Alfred Ramirez and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone for passing along the link.

The Reeler‘s Stu van Airsdale had a chat at last night’s New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony with The Lives of Others director Florian Henckle von Donnersmarck about There Will Be Blood.

The German director “was asked if he was a Blood man or No Country man. He said he’d only seen the first few minutes of the Coens’ film with his wife before the graphic violence compelled her to the exits with him in tow. It made him uncomfortable as well; he preferred the more psychological permutations of brutality spaced throughout There Will Be Blood.
“I can’t judge based on five minutes of the movie,” he said, “but I think it’ll be impossible to outdo it in my heart. It’s a film for film history. I’m in the Academy now, so PTA has my vote. Is he here? Paul Thomas Anderson? Have you seen him?”
No, van Airsdale said, but Daniel Day-Lewis would be there eventually. And when the actor did arrive, both to present Javier Bardem‘s supporting actor prize for No Country and collect his own Best Actor award for Blood, von Donnersmarck indeed cornered him while the rest of the room waited for a piece of him.”

“These are sobering times for the independent film industry,” Hollywood Reporter guy Gregg Goldstein has written. “Box-office revenue for films from indie distributors and specialty divisions dropped 11.9% from $1.32 billion in 2006 to $1.16 billion in 2007, while the number of indies in theaters increased from 501 to 530. Even more disturbing, only 16 of the films grossed more than $20 million (nearly half of them by a slim margin), down from 20 in 2006.”

Does Roger Deakins getting not one but two American Society of Cinematographers nominations today — for his work on No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — mean the vote will be split in half and that There Will Be Blood‘s Robert Elswit will take the award?
Janusz “milky white light” Kaminski won’t win for his Diving Bell and the Butterfly work (there are legions of milky-white-light haters out there…we all meet at the Sportsmen’s Lodge on Wednesday evenings) and Seamus McGarvey‘s Atonement work is off the radar because Atonement is off the radar because it’s imploding like the Clinton campaign.