Amour and The Master dominate LA critics awards

In the latest celebrity get-together of the film awards season, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association have handed their Best Film of 2012 prize to Amour, Michael Haneke’s peculiarly uplifting French-language drama about an octogenarian couple coping with terminal illness.

The Austrian director missed out on the Best Director honours to Paul Thomas Anderson, for The Master, which also collected the Best Actor prize for Joaquin Phoenix and the Best Supporting Actress for Amy Adams.

Best Actress was shared between Amour’s Emanuelle Riva and Jennifer Lawrence, who started 2012 with the children’s film The Hunger Games and ended it with one of the most adult comedy’s to come out of Hollywood in years, the awards-contender Silver Linings Playbook.

All the above winners are up for the corresponding prize at next month’s Oscars and most are also in contention at this weekend’s Golden Globes, although the Hollywood Foreign Press Association failed to nominate Amour in its Best Motion Picture Drama category, recognising it only in their Foreign Film category, in line with a practice of generally reserving places in the running for their top awards for the more mainstream crowd-pleasers.

The Weinstein Company label their champagne in honour of their Golden Globe nominees, Django Unchained, The Master, Kon Tiki, Quartet and Untouchable, known inexplicably in the US as The Intouchables

Similarly, overlooked by the Globes, but in his case even the Oscars too, the Best Supporting Actor prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association went to Dwight Henry from Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film itself that’s divided the awards-givers, with no nominations at the Globes, but up for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay at next month’s Academy Awards.

The prizes had been previously announced, but were handed out at a ceremony here in Los Angeles mid-awards-season, when all the winners would be in town anyway for the Globes, making it a particularly busy night for a wave of celebrities and industry insiders, flitting between a range of parties and more formal events; many began the evening at a BAFTA tea party, followed by drinks laid on by The Weinstein Company, in honour of its five nominated films, before stopping off at the LA Film Critics Awards on their way to a Universal Studios dinner, to honour the Golden Globe nominees from Les Miserables.

 

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