My Lunch with the Boston Film Critics

Fourth only to the oil still geysering out of BP's well, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and the retirement of Amanda Bynes, the ranking crisis in the world today is that the website for the Boston Society of Film Critics currently has "incomplete" winner information listed for both 1988 and 1989. Normally I would find a way to clench my jaw and power through this kind of setback, but as you know, I recently had the movies of these two particular years on the brain, and more than that, the BSFC is one of my absolute favorite film bodies anywhere.

Boston was the breeding ground for everything I came to know about cinema, during four collegiate years in which I haunted all the great theaters of that city: the Brattle, the Coolidge Corner, the Harvard Film Archive, the dearly departed Chéri with its huge single screen, and especially the Landmark Kendall Square, where I regularly stayed for longer spans of time than the paid workers did. During these years of discovering movies, the BSFC made gorgeously unexpected and catholic choices in their awards: they Best Picture'd Out of Sight before the NSFC thought of it, they thought gloriously outside the commercial box on Best Foreign Film selections like Taste of Cherry (which I had seen on the big screen at Coolidge Corner, and then again at the Harvard Film Archive), and showed great discernment and prescience in giving their 1998 Best Actress prize to then-unknown Samantha Morton for her lacerating work in Carine Adler's Under the Skin, also cited as the year's best debut feature. Nathaniel recently reminded us that 1998 wasn't the easiest year to find stellar Best Actress candidates, and the BSFC always came through in a clutch. The year before, Helena Bonham Carter very deservingly won for The Wings of the Dove, but even though runner-up information isn't as easy to find on the Web as it once was, I remember that she barely pipped Katrin Cartlidge in Career Girls and Tilda Swinton in my beloved Female Perversions (screened at the Landmark Kendall Square). Those are the sorts of gutsy choices that can win me over in perpetuity, and that's why the BSFC joins the New York, Los Angeles, and National Film Critics societies as the only film critics' organizations whose annual citations I archive on my website.

So, during my lunch break, since I was already in the library hunting down Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption, et al., I popped over to the microfiche room to get to the bottom of the missing BSFC winners' lists in 1988 and 1989. I realize that precisely no one is waiting for this info, but since IMDb currently isn't accepting updates to their Awards pages, I figure there is some sad Googler out there who will want this info, which I have already passed along to the BSFC itself. Maybe one of you kids can set the record straight over at Wikipedia. Forthwith:

Boston Society of Film Critics, 1988

Picture: Bull Durham
(see how smart they are?)

Director: Stephen Frears, Dangerous Liaisons
(snubbed by the Academy, but fêted here)

Actress: Melanie Griffith, Working Girl
(disappointing, since all sites erroneously list the superior Susan Sarandon in BD)

Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(extremely well-played, BSFC!)

Supporting Actress: Joan Cusack, Married to the Mob, Stars and Bars, and Working Girl
(just the kind of body of work one likes to see recognized)

Supporting Actor: Dean Stockwell, Married to the Mob and Tucker: The Man and His Dream
(lots of critics' prizes that year for Stockwell)

Screenplay: Ron Shelton, Bull Durham
(couldn't have done better than that)

Cinematography: Sven Nykvist, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(again, well-played)

Foreign Film: Salaam Bombay!, Mira Nair
(an important film to recognize, and trounces Oscar's choice)

Documentary Feature: The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris
(virtually everyone's choice, and understandably so)

Special Awards: Liane Brandon (Boston-based independent filmmaker) and Richard Williams (animation director, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

I love the BSFC for those kinds of broad-minded Special Awards. Even better, they honored five of the year's best revival series at Boston movie theaters, and the five best movies that were either unearthed, restored, or re-released during the calendar year, which in this case included the long-hidden Manchurian Candidate, the LGBT festival screening The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart and Louis Malle's important film Lacombe, Lucien. Could a critics' body do more important work than shining a light on revivals and restorations, alongside the big-tent pictures?



Boston Society of Film Critics, 1989

Picture: Crimes and Misdemeanors
(sure knocks Oscar's choice into the shade)

Director: Woody Allen, Crimes and Misdemeanors
(at least he held on for an Oscar nod)

Actress: Jessica Tandy, Driving Miss Daisy
(uh-oh! breaks Pfeiffer's sweep of all the other critics' organizations)

Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot
(a well-earned repeat for Daniel)

Supporting Actress: Brenda Fricker, My Left Foot
(did her awards heat begin here?)

Supporting Actor: Danny Aiello, Do the Right Thing
(confoundingly, one of very few critics' laurels for this film)

Screenplay: Woody Allen, Crimes and Misdemeanors
(they sure did love this one)

Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus, The Fabulous Baker Boys
(another unimpeachable choice)

Foreign Film: Story of Women, Claude Chabrol
(way tougher choice than Cinema Paradiso)

Documentary Feature: Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber
(against the strong critical tide for Roger & Me)

Special Awards: To the Brattle Theatre, on its 100th anniversary, and to the restoration efforts of the Coolidge Corner Theater and the Somerville Theater

Again, the BSFC goes out of its way to honor local film culture, specifically on behalf of some of the very moviehouses that, less than a decade later, would be so central to my informal education. And again, five more film series were honored by the group, including a very important retrospective at Harvard of the work of John Cassavetes, and five more citations for major rediscoveries and restorations, including those for Carnival of Souls, Lawrence of Arabia, the controversial animated film Coonskin, and the Yiddish-language film The Dybbuk from 1937.

I hope everyone is now resting easier with this crucial information. But if you take a few rental suggestions away from this post, I assure you that you can hardly go wrong! And while you're at it, if this inspires you to keep up with the regular reviews filed by Wesley Morris and Ty Burr over at the Boston Globe—two of the country's best weekly reviewers, employed by a paper that is still supporting the role of the serious film critic—then I'll be even happier that I spent my lunch break on this. Carry on!

P.S. The BSFC winners from 1992 are not listed as "Incomplete," but I know there was no way that listing was a full one, so (I can't stop!):



Boston Society of Film Critics, 1992

Picture: Unforgiven
(no stunner)

Director: Robert Altman, The Player
(nice splitting of the prizes)

Actress: Emma Thompson, Howards End
(all of the extant sites erroneously promote Judy Davis to this category)

Actor: Denzel Washington, Malcolm X
(a consensus choice, but who could argue?)

Supporting Actress: Judy Davis, Husbands and Wives and Where Angels Fear to Tread
(I think this was the only group to list both of these turns)

Supporting Actor: Gene Hackman, Unforgiven
(again, not a surprise but you can't blame them)

Screenplay: Neil Jordan, The Crying Game
(Hooray!)

Cinematography: Jack Green, Unforgiven
(once again, a well-earned prize for an Academy runner-up)

Foreign Film: Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou
(eclipses his early 00s work, if that's all you know)

Documentary Feature: Brother's Keeper, Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky
(another personal favorite)

Special Awards: To David Kleiler for his comitment to diverse, alternative programming at the Coolidge Corner Theater, and to Frank Avruch of WCVB-TV for hosting The Great Entertainment for 18 years

Recognized film series included "Classic Arkoff: At the Drive-In with American International Pictures" and "Marvelous Méliès" at Harvard Film Archive; "The Films of Mike Leigh" at the Museum of Fine Arts; "The Films of Robert Altman" at the Brattle; and "Yiddish Film: Between Two Worlds," jointly screened at the MFA, Coolidge Corner, and Brandeis University. Discoveries and rediscoveries included De Palma's Blowout, Altman's California Split, Renoir's The Golden Coach, Leigh's Meantime, and Welles's Othello.