This morning, the DFW Film Critics Association announced their awards for the best movies of 2014. I am a member of this group, and I turned in my vote on Saturday. Birdman wound up being the big winner, with gongs for the best film, the best actor award (Michael Keaton), the best director (Alejandro González Iñárritu), the best screenplay (four writers), and the best cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki). Edward Norton and Emma Stone both placed second in the supporting actor categories as well.
I seem to have gone rogue this year; only two of the movies on the association’s top 10 list made it onto my ballot. None of the DFWFCA’s best actress picks matched up with mine (Reese Witherspoon won for Wild), though it seems to me that my ideas about the best actresses and supporting actresses seem to deviate from my colleagues’ more than my selections for male actors. What’s that about? Also, none of my choices for Best Foreign Language Film made it onto the association’s top five either, though I thought highly of all my fellow film critics’ choices. (The winner was the darkly funny Swedish film Force Majeure.) On the other hand, the association and I both picked J.K. Simmons as the best supporting actor for Whiplash, and we also agreed on The Lego Movie as the year’s best animated film.
I’ll have much more on my picks for the year’s best movies in the next couple of weeks, but feel free to use the space below to discuss what you think of the DFW Film Critics’ choices.
