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Millimeter10 Years of Critics' Choice Awards
Jan 5, 2005 3:57 PM,
By Cynthia Wisehart
Photographs by Alan Berliner, Jon Kopaloff, and Lucy Nicholson
A Brief History of an Industry Upstart
The Nicholson/Williams show set the tone for the 2003 Critics’ Choice Awards gala.
"I don't usually get this hammered," Jack Nicholson says slyly as he takes the mic to accept his 2002 Critics' Choice award for Best Actor, "especially when it's on TV."
Nicholson shared his award for About Schmidt with fellow nominee Daniel Day-Lewis, who won for his portrayal of Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York. With a dangerous-looking wave of the arm, Nicholson summoned the third Best Actor nominee and "loser," Robin Williams, to the stage, a move that must have made the E! Networks producer thankful for tape delay (this would not be Ving Rhames sweetly handing his statuette to Jack Lemmon). As Day-Lewis stood elegantly by, the two icons launched into a long, giddy, conspiratorial improv that was the stuff of awards show legend.
That same year, the Critics' Choice Awards continued to be a barometer of what the Academy of Motion Pictures would do when it came time to vote for the Oscars: The Critics' Choice Awards for Best Picture, and Best Supporting Actress/Actor prefaced unorthodox Oscar wins for Chicago, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Chris Cooper. Of all the Critics' Choice nominees in the Best Picture, Directing, and Acting categories, only Robin Williams and Steven Spielberg did not go on to Oscar nominations. Even Oscar's controversial nod to Eminem for Best Song and Michael Moore's win for Bowling for Columbine were foreshadowed at the 2003 Critics' Choice Awards, as was the Academy's unexpected award to Spirited Away for Best Animated Picture.
Honorees Clint Eastwood and Sir Ben Kingsley attended the 2004 Critics’ Choice Awards event, telecast live on E!
The following year, the ninth annual Critics' Choice Awards predicted 100 percent of the winners for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Animated Feature with awards to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Charlize Theron, Sean Penn, Renee Zellweger, Tim Robbins, Peter Jackson, TheBarbarian Invasions, and Finding Nemo. This time, the critics' appreciation for non-traditional songs ("A Mighty Wind") was not equally shared by the Academy (the song did receive a nomination). However, both bodies agreed on the Best Score of the Year— Howard Shore's sweeping composition for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
The Critics' Choice Awards are selected by the most populist-minded of the country's film critics, a position that often makes them the butt of movie marketing jokes and the target of some particularly vitriolic prose. Sometimes characterized as the "junket press," Critics' Choice voters are nonetheless the first voices most filmgoers hear on new releases—via television, radio, or Internet—and the association members take that relationship seriously. As a group, the broadcast critics see more films than any other critics' association, and their record for gauging what the Academy will do is statistically significant. For example, between 1997 and 2004, the Critics' Choice nominations predicted all but two of 35 Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. By comparison, the Golden Globes went a different way on six films during the same period.
Of course, although the critics' mid-December nominations and the early January awards anticipate the Oscars to a remarkable degree, they can also be counted on for a few independentminded twists. But if you're a Joan Allen fan, you already know that.
A Running Start, Literally
In December 1995, when broadcast film critics Joey Berlin and Rod Lurie decided to launch a Hollywood awards show, they had three weeks to work with and a 10-year plan already in mind. "We planned to make it onto network television, we wanted to rival the Golden Globes," Berlin says simply, and 10 years hence, that's exactly what's happened. Early on, Lurie quoted François Truffaut's interest in films that demonstrated "the joy of filmmaking or the trauma of filmmaking," and suggested that the Critics' Choice criteria would run along similar lines.
Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Billy Bob Thornton, James Cameron, and Charlize Theron all received Critics’ Choice Awards nominations and wins in advance of their nominations and wins from the Academy.
That first year, at the January luncheon at the Hotel Sofitel, Paul Sorvino tearfully presented to his daughter, Mira, the first honor of what would be her Oscar year for Mighty Aphrodite. Even then, with their award to Mel Gibson for Braveheart, the Critics' Choice Awards demonstrated a flair for choosing Best Directors that has turned into a streak—eight of their nine awards have anticipated the Academy's Best Director, missing only on Roman Polanski, whom the CCA nominated alongside winner Steven Spielberg.
The first Critics' Choice Awards also predicted Kevin Spacey's Oscar for The Usual Suspects and Emma Thompson's win for her Sense and Sensibility script. With nods to Il Postino, Crumb, Babe, and Nicole Kidman in To Die For, it was also clear from the beginning that the CCA choices would honor an unprejudiced definition of filmmaking craft encompassing wit, innovation, and entertainment value. This unabashed mainstream approach led to the inauguration of the Critics' Choice Best Young Actor/Actress Award for 1996. Jerry Maguire's Jonathan Lipnicki became the first to win an award that would honor a series of promising young performers including Haley Joel Osment, Dakota Fanning, and Keisha Castle-Hughes, among others. The lovely Fly Away Home won the first Best Family Film award, an honor that would later go to such films as A Bug's Life, Whale Rider, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
The 1996 Critics' Choice Best Picture win for Fargo and Breakout Artist for 27-year-old Renee Zellweger further demonstrated the broadcast critics' ability to relate to audiences and spot enduring charm in many forms. Zellweger's award, which cited "the hint of steel-spined strength beneath her seeming vulnerability," foreshadowed Roxie Hart and Ruby Thewes by six and seven years—performances that won her both Critics' Choice and Academy Award honors.
As the Academy would that year, the critics gave acting awards to Geoffrey Rush, Frances McDormand, and Cuba Gooding Jr.; directing honors to Anthony Minghella; Best Documentary to When We Were Kings; and honored Joan Allen's performance in The Crucible for Best Supporting Actress, a role that would earn her an Oscar nomination alongside winner Juliette Binoche. With Rush in attendance, critic Michael Medved's program essay eloquently made the case for the Australian actor's virtuosity and emergence on the American scene in Shine, suggesting that for all the sound bytes, broadcast critics—at least some of them—can really write. Lauren Bacall, there to receive the first CCA Lifetime Achievement Award, sat at the front table, heckling host Richard Jeni when he fell back on the old standup trick of mocking the event he was emceeing.
When Jack Nicholson showed up at the third annual Critics' Choice Awards to accept his Best Actor honor for As Good As It Gets, and James Cameron brought Kate Winslet to collect his Best Director award, the little luncheon-that-could was becoming a festive affair. With Kevin Pollak hosting, Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland came to celebrate their award for a risky adaptation of James Ellroy's classic novel into an equally classic film—with a different ending. As critic Bill Margold pointed out at the time, L.A. Confidential "was all about the difference between doing what is right and doing what is righter," and the CCA seemed to draw inspiration from that thought, choosing films and performances that both echoed and expanded the sentiments of the film-going public. Spike Lee's Best Documentary 4 Little Girls embraced and challenged conventional documentary attitude and style, a quality that also contributed to its Oscar nomination that year. Matt Damon was the Critics' Choice Breakthrough Performer for 1997, honored as well for his Good Will Hunting script with Ben Affleck. And just as the CCA celebrated the beginning of those young careers, veteran "director's director" Robert Wise was on hand to accept his Critics' Choice Lifetime Achievement award.
On January 19, 1999 Steven Spielberg accepted his Critics' Choice Best Director and Best Picture awards for Saving Private Ryan. Arriving at the CCA luncheon with an effusive Drew Barrymore, crouching down to sign autographs for fellow Critics' Choice honoree Ian Michael Smith (Simon Birch), and chatting casually with colleagues including John Travolta and Kelly Preston, Spielberg fit seamlessly into the unpretentious atmosphere of the luncheon, even as his appearance helped ensure that this would be the final year at the cozy Sofitel ballroom. Billy Bob Thornton in an outrageous shirt, James Coburn in a classic beard, and Kathy Bates in her reading glasses, joined fellow winners and soon-to-be Oscar nominees Roberto Benigni and Ian McKellen in the packed and congenial room, providing a kind of finale to the CCA's first act.
A Fancy Hotel and Network TV
Early in 2000, days before the 1999 awards luncheon, Berlin realized that the RSVP list had outgrown the available seats, and the fifth annual Critics' Choice Awards moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel for a five-year run. That same year, while the venerable—and often Oscar-savvy—Golden Globes went with Best Picture nominations including The Hurricane and The End of the Affair, for the second year in a row, the BFCA had 100 percent of Oscar's Best Picture nominations on its roster, predicting nominations for The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, The Insider, and The Sixth Sense and the win for American Beauty. When first-time film director Sam Mendes, relative unknown Hilary Swank, and the thenunderappreciated Angelina Jolie stepped up to accept their Best Directing, Acting, and Supporting awards, the Critics' Choice voters proved that they could spot the kind of upstart performances that make awards shows interesting. All three artists went on to win Golden Globes and Oscars that year.
Also that year, Russell Crowe continued his reciprocal affection for radio critics when he came to collect his Best Actor award for The Insider and helped his colleagues Michael Mann and Eric Roth celebrate their Alan J. Pakula Award for socially rovocative filmmaking.
The 2000 CCA event was the second to benefit the Starlight Children's Foundation, a relationship that continues to this day, as the international non-profit works in support of seriously ill children through events, programs, and wish-granting for thousands of families every month. Starting in 2003, the BFCA continued to expand its philanthropic activities, supporting a second charity, KidsCare Mobilization. The organization matches up federal healthcare insurance allotments with children of working families, stemming the billion-dollar forfeiture of funds that occurs when children go unenrolled in state health insurance programs.
Appropriately, considering that the BFCA membership includes online broadcast journalists, the fifth annual Critics' Choice Awards were broadcast for the first time—online via On2.com. The following year, the broadcast moved to E! for the first of four annual broadcasts that went live for the ninth annual Critics' Choice Awards on Jan. 10, 2004.
The E! agreement marked a milestone for the Critics' Choice Awards, introducing the successful industry event to television audiences. That year, the Critics' Choice event was enlivened by Gladiator teammates and CCA honorees Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott, on their way to Oscar wins for Best Actor and Best Picture. Steven Soderbergh, Ang Lee, Stephen Gaghan, and Cameron Crowe all got a preview of their Oscar wins when they accepted their Critics' Choice
awards that afternoon. Ditto Julia Roberts who accepted via tape. Sting and Hans Zimmer, who came to collect their CCA statuettes for Best Song and Best Score, went on to Oscar nominations, demonstrating another area of the critics' strange predictive expertise: Since they began awarding Best Song and Best Score for the 1998 films, all but one of their honorees have gone on to Oscar nominations and/or wins. That year, a whimsical nod for Best Inanimate Object to Wilson, the plucky volleyball in Cast Away, sparked a brief, hilarious program essay from critic Gino Salamone who spun the critics' cliché of acting from the inside out: In this case, the inside being a twoply, rotationally molded polyurethane bladder. It was the last truly offbeat touch that the critics allowed themselves, a fitting farewell to the casual luncheon spirit of the first six ceremonies. By the following year, the Critics' Choice Awards had to take itself at least a little more seriously, since everyone else was doing so.
Nominees, Nightime, and Primetime
For the 2001 awards, the Critics' Choice made the move to an evening ceremony on an earlier date—Jan. 11, 2002—hosted by Bill Maher. The nomination process was expanded beyond Best Picture to all categories, with a majority of the nominees and winners gathering for cocktails and dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Jennifer Connelly joined in to celebrate the beginning of a very good year for A Beautiful Mind. Dakota Fanning, 7, was boosted up to the mic, and Will Smith played straight man to Muhammad Ali, presenting him with the Prudential Freedom award, an honor that would go to Denzel Washington and Antwone Fisher the following year.
As the Golden Globes would also do, the Critics' Choice voters chose Russell Crowe for Best Actor and Sissy Spacek for Best Actress, missing the opportunity to foreshadow Oscar's history-making wins for Denzel Washington and Halle Berry. It was a rare miss for the CCA—of all the 2001- 2002 Critics' Choice nominees, a striking 85 percent went on to Oscar nominations.
In January 2003, by the time Jack Nicholson and Robin Williams had commandeered the stage for their pas de deux, the eighth annual Critics' Choice Awards was riding on the spirit of all the previous awards and the little victories that had confirmed the show as one of Hollywood's actual big nights. Catherine Zeta-Jones' spirited acceptance of her first Best Supporting award of the year, and the group bow with her cast mates from Chicago for Best Acting Ensemble; Nicole Kidman's gracious presence with The Hours director Stephen Daldry; Denzel Washington accepting the Freedom Award; Spielberg making his third appearance at the awards; and a general energy of gravitas, festivity, and fun contributed to Berlin's sense of accomplishment: The show he had envisioned nearly 10 years earlier had become a reality.
The 2004 Critics' Choice Awards got an unexpected boost when a change to the Oscar schedule meant nominations would close during the time period between the Critics' Choice Awards and the Golden Globes, causing The Hollywood Reporter to ask whether the Critics' Choice Awards could "supplant the Golden Globes as the 'second best' awards show of the season."
The Critics’ Choice Awards anticipated Oscar nominations and wins for Ang Lee, Steven Soderbergh, and Ridley Scott. The Critics’ Choice winner for Best Director has won the Academy Award for Best Director eight out of nine times since the CCA’s inception. Critics’ Choice nominations have predicted 33 of the last 35 Best Picture nominations; the Critics’ Choice Awards has picked Oscar’s Best Picture every year since 1999.
"The position on the calendar that is mostly responsible for giving the Globes its impact in Hollywood was now wide open to us," Berlin said at the time, referring to the fact that the Critics' Choice would be—as The Reporter explained—"the only major movietrophy program televised before Oscar voters cast their first round of ballots."
This fortuitous piece of scheduling converged with E!'s move to air the show live for the first time, and the BFCA's decision to put four to five nominees forward in most categories instead of three, as they had done for the previous two years. The uptick in nominees only seemed to make the critics more prescient; the Critics' Choice winners predicted the Oscars in the categories of Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Foreign Film, Best Animated Film, and Best Score.
By now the event had become confirmed on the A-list schedule. Hosted by Will & Grace lead Eric McCormack, telecast in its entirety, and attended by a broad range of Hollywood elite including nominees Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, Clint Eastwood, Charlize Theron, Ben Kingsley, Peter Weir, Paul Bettany, Jerry Bruckheimer, and many more, the show caught the attention of executives at The WB. BFCA attorney Dan Black of Greenberg Traurig negotiated a threeyear deal to broadcast the event on The WB starting with the tenth annual Critics' Choice Awards.
"It's an event we think we can build into a successful franchise for The WB," says Keith Cox, senior vice president, Alternative Programming, in a statement, which also announced that Bob Bain Productions would produce the telecast. In addition to producing the Billboard Music Awards and the Miss America telecast, Bain produces the Nickelodeon's Kids' Choice Awards. Tom Cruise will accept a special career achievement award, and it's a fair bet that past loyal Critics' Choice honorees will return to help celebrate the event's 10th anniversary and make a final pitch for Oscar's benefit. Not bad for starting out as an impromptu lunch.
Cynthia Wisehart is the editor of Millimeter, a professional film production trade magazine, and millimeter.com.
Steven Spielberg was one of the first Hollywood heavyweights to join into the BFCA's spirit, six years ago attending for the first time to accept his Best Picture and Best Director awards for Saving Private Ryan. He was subsequently honored as Filmmaker of the Decade for his body of work, particularly for his achievement on Saving Private Ryan—made all the more resonant and sadly relevant by the march of events.
"I have happy recollections of the night I was honored for Saving Private Ryan, the following year when I received the Filmmaker of the Decade Award and two years ago when the Broadcast Film Critics honored me for Catch Me If You Can and Minority Report," Spielberg says. "It is from the BFCA that you first hear about our movies. They have a longstanding tradition of reaching millions of people on their broadcasts, and their move up through the ranks of year-end acknowledgers is long overdue. Now they are here to stay, and all of us celebrate them for it."
In 1999, the Critics' Choice Awards began honoring the Best Animated Feature of the year, a precedent that the Academy took up in 2002, choosing Critics' Choice Award-winner Shrek. In 2003, both the Critics' Choice and Oscar nominated Ice Age, Lilo & Stitch, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and the common winner Spirited Away. Last year both bodies nominated Brother Bear, The Triplets of Belleville, and the common winner Finding Nemo.
"The Critics' Choice was the first nomination that Nemo received and the first awards ceremony to attend; therefore, it was automatically one of the most memorable for me," says codirector Andrew Stanton. "Winning was a real thrill for my co-director Lee Unkrich and me, and the award became a wonderful herald of more to come. The Critics' Choice Award is particularly satisfying because all the critics you've come to know and recognize over the months of doing press junkets show up again at the ceremony and tell you again how much they love your movie—only this time you know they mean it!"
One of the longest-running relationships in Critics' Choice history is based on the CCA's inexhaustible enthusiasm for Russell Crowe's work. Crowe has reciprocated with a graciousness that would seem to indicate a true affection for the event. Crowe received three consecutive Best Actor awards from the CCA, for The Insider, Gladiator, and A Beautiful Mind and was nominated for his performance in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World last year.
On the podium, accepting his Best Actor award for A Beautiful Mind, Crowe was spontaneous and heartfelt, thanking in particular Ron Howard, "whose command of the medium is beyond question, whose attention to detail and willingness to collaborate and whose intellect are all pristine examples of a director in his prime," Crowe said. He paused and added, "Suffice it to say, 'Opie done good!'", then immediately turned to Howard, contrite and urgently apologetic. "I'm sorry, mate! I'm sorry!"
The BFCA acknowledged the importance of behind-the-scenes artists in its 2004 Ten Best Fest. The seven-day film festival at the Beverly Hills Pacific Design Center, organized by David Poland, ran from Jan. 2 to 8, leading up to the Critics' Choice Awards and the close of Oscar nomination voting. An invited audience from the American Society of Cinematographers, the Visual Effects Society, the Writers' Guild, and others gathered to screen the Critics' Choice 2004 Ten Best Films. The screenings were followed by live question-and-answer sessions with directors, producers, and writers including Anthony Minghella (pictured with Sam Rubin and collecting a Critics' Choice Award from James Gandolfini). Given the Oscar schedule, the festival was an opportunity for guild members who are also Academy voters to screen some of the year's key contenders.
The Prudential Financial Freedom Award, one of the BFCA's occasional awards for special achievement, was presented first to Muhammad Ali by his affectionate straight man Will Smith, a role Smith earned the hard way, recreating the legendary boxer for the Michael Mann film Ali. The following year, the Freedom Award went to first-time director Denzel Washington and first-time screenwriter and inspirational survivor Antwone Fisher, who earned everything the hard way.
The 2003 Lexus Passion in Film Award honored Peter Weir as much for his passionate and conscientious process as for the spectacular results on Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
