The Clint-rules faction prevailed in the Los Angeles Film Critics Association voting earlier today, resulting in the org’s Best Picture prize going to Letters From Iwo Jima — a very deserving choice. This is the second such tribute handed to Clint Eastwood‘s Japanese-language Iwo Jima drama following the National Board of Review’s Best Picture honoring two or three days ago.

The big winners beside this were Stephen Frears‘ The Queen and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘ Little Miss Sunshine. The former captured four awards and one runner-up prize, including a Best Actress trophy for Helen Mirren (her second following the Boston Film Critics decision just a couple of hours ago), plus a Best Supporting Actor award for Michael Sheen and a Best Screenplay win for Peter Morgan. Dayton, Faris and screenwriter Michael Arndt won the New Generation Award, and Arndt was named 1st runner-up for Best Screenplay.
United 93‘s Paul Greengrass, however, was named Best Director (with Eastwood getting the runner-up prize for Letters and Flags of Our Fathers). Borat‘s Sacha Baron Cohen and The Last King of Scotland‘s Forest Whitaker tied for the Best Actor prize.
Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore‘s An Inconvenient Truth was named Best Documentary. Happy Feet won for Best Animated Feature .
Volver‘s Penelope Cruz was just behind Mirren in the Best Actress voting, and Pan’s Labyrinth costar Sergi Lopez was the runner-up in the best Supporting Actor category.
A big surprise (and a possible indicator of critical reservations about Dreamgirls) was the Best Supporting Actress award going to Luminita Gheorghiu — who? — for her performance in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. The runner-up in this category was Dreamgirls powerhouse Jennifer Hudson. (There’s no joy in Mudville over this one, let me tell you.)

The great Emmanuel Lubezki won the Best Cinematography award — deservedly — for his work on Children of Men. (Runner-up: Tom Stern for Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima.) The Best Production Design award went to Pan’s Labyrinth‘s Eugenio Caballero, (good call) — the runners up were Children of Men‘s Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland.
Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others won for Best Foreign Language film…yes! (Runner up: Volver.) Alexandre Desplat won the Best Musical Score award for his work on The Queen and The Painted Veil. (Runner-up: Thomas Newman for The Good German and Little Children.

The Boston Society of Film Critics met earlier today and gave Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed their Best Picture prize, with Scorsese named as Best Director. And — this is awesome — Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 was named first runner-up. Total agreement! I wasn’t expecting United 93 to rank as a last-minute punch-through — I thought it had done a fade. United 93 also placed as one of the American Film Institute’s just-announced top ten.

The Beantown guys also chose The Last King of Scotland‘s Forest Whitaker for Best Actor (with Half Nelson‘s Ryan Gosling named runner-up). The Queen‘s Helen Mirren took the Best Actress prize (runner: Judi Dench in Notes on a Scandal),
The Best Supporting Actor prize went to The Departed‘s Mark Wahlberg (the guy gave a great scrappy performance but this comes as a bit of a surprise!…could this be a regional-loyalty thing, Wahlberg being from the Boston area?). The e-mail I received about this from one of the Boston critics says the Supporting Actor runners-up were The Queen‘s Michael Sheen and The Departed‘s Alec Baldwin….but it was written confusingly.
The Best Supporting Actress trophy went to Half Nelson‘s Shareeka Epps, with Meryl Streep‘s The Devil Wears Prada performance taking the runner-up distinction.
The Best Ensemble Cast went to the United 93 team, with The Departed crew taking first runner-up. The Best Screenplay award went to The Departed‘s William Monahan, with Peter Morgan named runner-up for his screenplay for The Queen.
Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth was named Best Foreign Language Film. (Runner-up: Pedro Almodovar‘s Volver.)

The Best Documentary prize was a tie between Deliver Us From Evil and Shut Up & Sing. (Runner-up: 51 Birch Street.)
The Best New Filmmaker award went to Half Nelson director Ryan Fleck. (Runners-up: Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris for Little Miss Sunshine.) The Best Cinematography award went to Pan’s Labyrinth‘s Guillermo Navarro. (I must take exception — as sublime as Navarro’s work is, it isn’t in the same realm as Emmanuel Lubezki’s for Children of Men.)
The tied Best Cinematography runners-up were The Painted Veil‘s Stuart Dryburgh and Curse of the Golden Flower‘s Xiaoding Zhao.

Weekend estimates for Apocalypto have slightly downscaled — Mel Gibson’s film is now projected to come in at $14,531,000. Happy Feet is expected to finish at $13,661, The Holiday with 12,854,000, Casino Royale with $9,119,000, Blood Diamond with a slightly higher figure of $8,375,000 (still a tank), Unaccompanied Minors with $6,008,000, Deja Vu with $6,005,000 and The Nativity Story with $5,111,000.

“The AFI, for my money, has great taste. Their choices are often the best reviewed films of the year but they also include films that made a mark, whether or not they got stellar reviews overall. The most significant thing about them is that in the beginning, they used to do the awards thing with nominations (and acting categories) but that seemed to add to the overall awards orgy and [so] hey stopped their practice. Now they name a top ten and that’s it. You can see that all five best picture nominees are on this list.” — Oscarwatch‘s Sasha Stone on the AFI ’06 award winners, which will be announced later today.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association meets today sometime around midday and will announce its decisions by 5 pm or so….perhaps earlier. The New York Film Critics Circle will gather at 9 ayem Monday morning. In years past a NYFCC webmaster has posted the winners in tandem as they’ve been decided upon…which I’ve always loved. I’m arranging to record a chat with NYFCC chairman Marshall Fine tomorrow afternoon around 2.

The great Kirk Douglas turned 90 today, and instead of the usual sentiments — “It’s been a wonderful life…I love my grandchildren…I’m looking forward to many more happy years” — he’s released a rabble-rousing statement about a crying need for GenY to do something about the “mess” we’re living in. Damn straight. (The Reeler’s Stu VanAirsdale passed this along.)

Cymfony, an independent market analytics firm, has released figures from an extensive study showing that Blu-ray is lagging far behind HD DVD in positive opinion, says this Dark Horizons sum-up. According to Yahoo, the report distinctly cites that unlike many studies in this field, Cymfony’s was not sponsored by any manufacturer or other organization affiliated with either of the formats. It claims that “the buzz for HD DVD is 46 % greater than that for Blu-ray, and that’s among both high-def early adopters and the gaming community.”

To New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, writing about Neal Gabler‘s “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” (Knopf; $35), the most striking aspect of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs “is the macabre punch…the poisoned apple rolling from the outstretched hand, the witch transfigured from a snotty Joan Crawford figure to something yet more disturbing.

“As for the sight of the threatened girl haring through the forest, pursued by a posse of swirling leaves, with the branches clawing at her clothes, it possesses not just the sharp-toothed, half-Teutonic atmosphere that Disney could reliably conjure from his artists; it is also edited with a violent sophistication that chops straight into children’s dreams. For a moment, it looks like Eisenstein.
“It is no surprise, then, to learn that the director of Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible was a Disneyphile. “The work of this master,” Eisenstein claimed, “is the greatest contribution of the American people to art.”

The reason Flags of Our Fathers failed “was because the genre was tapped out. First, Hollywood paid tribute to the men who died at Normandy [via Saving Private Ryan]. Then it paid tribute to the men who died at Pearl Harbor [via Michael Bay‘s film]. Then it made a side trip to Iraq with Three Kings and Jarhead.
“But by the time Clint Eastwood got around to paying tribute to the men who fell on Iwo Jima, movie audiences were getting emotionally worn out by all this patriotic gore. Moreover, the young people who go to movie theatres today are [having] a hard time relating to a battle that took place 61 years ago This isn’t Flags of Our Fathers, it’s Flags of Our Grandfathers.” — the crochety Joe Queenan writing in today’s Guardian. (Except it was viewable last night, which means it’s basically a Friday, 12.8 piece, which means HE is behind the curve.)
The other reason Flags failed is because nobody gave that much of a shit about the war-bond tour scenes. Guys feeling fraudulent about making personal appearances across the country in order to raise money for the war effort didn’t strike anyone as being especially painful or arduous, even.

When it’s time to cut jobs to make way for fresh hires, why do so many companies always whack people right before the holidays? Because they want them off the payroll before the new year begins for…what, tax reasons? I’ve seen this happen again and again, and it’s absolutely heartless. Not only did Hollywood Reporter management decide to slash five employees earlier this week, but they’ve also cancelled their annual holiday party. Nice people!

Nobody knows anything about tomorrow’s Los Angeles Film Critics Association voting, the results of which should be known by 5 pm or so. Nonetheless, I have a couple of hunches. LAFCA’s Best Picture winners are occasionally contrarian in one of two ways — they try and help out the proverbial little guy (i.e., a highly regarded “critics film” that has had trouble at the box-office or received insufficient support from its distributor), or they simply honor the cinematic merits of a film with an almost perverse disregard for the herd mentality, even if the winner has a shortcoming or two.
If this is a contrarian year (and the ingredients are in place in that there’s no one film with a big head of steam), that means they may go political and give it to Todd Field‘s Little Children, which New Line has only marginally supported since it opened, or (my personal hope) Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men, a thrillingly composed tour de force that’s facing tough odds at the box-office, or, even more perversely, Jean-Pierre Melville‘s Army of Shadows, a 1969 film about the French resistance that has gotten several raves from big-gun critics.
If none of these three can build a big-enough consensus and LAFCA still wants to go contrarian, the big prize will go to The Departed. Pound for pound and move for move, no film provided as much sheer revved-up delight. The bizarre Catholic-guilt ending aside, it’s almost a complete 100% popcorn high, albeit in a sophistica- ted, high-end way. Plus it’s the Martin Scorsese film everyone’s been waiting for since Goodfellas. The fact that Scorsese probably has the Best Director prize in the bag may mean LAFCA will go elsewhere for Best Picture…who knows?
I heard from two big-wheel critics yesterday, and one of them wrote:the following: “Frankly, it’s wide open. I’ve been chatting with several members, and there’s no clear front runner or front-runner group. I’ve heard about everything from Army of Shadows to Flags of Our Fathers to Letters From Iwo Jima to Dreamgirls” — say what? — “to The Departed to United 93 to you-name-it. (Not to mention Volver, Babel, The Pursuit of Happyness, Apocalypto, et. al.)
“Anyone claiming on any website regarding any voting org (LAFCA or otherwise) that there’s a front-runner is either lying, has an agenda or is misinformed — or a bit of all three. I like it when it’s wide open since this allows the voting group to get more creative and move away from the dull middlebrow toward something more interesting. I love the stuff I’m hearing about Army of Shadows — that would throw the Hollywood types into a tizzy, and it would be eminently well-deserved.”
I suppose the Best Picture prize could also go to Letters From Iwo Jima. As good as it is — it’s a far better film than Flags of Our Fathers — it doesn’t quite have the startling high-throttle quality that I feel a Best Picture winner ought to possess. But then I’m not a voter. I’m just sitting here in a warm Brooklyn apartment.