My LAFCA Awards Presentation for Jomo Fray, Cinematographer of 'Nickel Boys'

The devastating Los Angeles fires in January forced the postponement of this year's Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards dinner. But on February 6th, the show went on, resulting in an evening that was a little more subdued but, nonetheless, still rather joyous. It was my honor to present our award for Best Cinematography, which deservedly went to the year's best film. Here were my remarks from the stage:

Few cinematographers today are more exciting than Jomo Fray. He has shot some of the most distinctive feature debuts in recent memory, including Selah and the Spades and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. His images are tactile, lived-in — they stun without feeling showy. His camerawork, which is often centered on Black narratives, has the grace of a poem.

Tonight, we celebrate his crucial contribution to Nickel Boys, deservedly praised for its audacious use of first-person POV. Working alongside first-time feature director RaMell Ross, Fray had to determine precisely how the film’s teenage characters would take in their world, shooting on locations that often had to be 360-degree environments, with a nimble camera meant to replicate Elwood and Turner’s sentient perspective. From a craft standpoint, Nickel Boys was an enormous undertaking.

But anyone moved beyond words by this film doesn’t talk about aspect ratios or SnorriCam rigs. Instead, we marvel at myriad indelible shots that feel like childhood memories. Nickel Boys is full of pain and sorrow, but there’s also an incredible innocence to it — we don’t just see the film from Elwood and Turner’s perspective, we reconnect with the spirit of being young, back when our impressionable eyes were hungrily absorbing everything around us. Fray’s camera is attuned to these terrors and joys. We practically smell the stench of the so-called White House, where the Black students of Nickel are beaten. But we also delight at the sight of an adorable girl smiling under our seat on a bus.

The film invites us to experience it all in this most extraordinary of coming-of-age dramas, to bear witness to a country’s history of racism and cruelty — a history that remains so very present. Nickel Boys is an act of love and an act of defiance. And Jomo Fray makes sure we never look away.

Please join me in congratulating our winner for Best Cinematography, Jomo Fray.

I was so glad to have Jomo Fray there. I hadn't met him, and he was, unsurprisingly, terrific. (Also, everybody loved his outfit.) All of our winners can be found here. This photo was taken by Shiloh Strong.

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for Jonathan Glazer, Director of 'The Zone of Interest'

January was a whirlwind, so I'm only now posting this. It was my honor at this year's Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards banquet, held January 13th at the Biltmore in downtown, to present our Best Director prize. These were my remarks from the stage.

Much has been made of the fact that writer-director Jonathan Glazer spent 10 years working on The Zone of Interest. But I would argue that it feels like a lifetime has been poured into this astonishing film. A lifetime of artistic growth and soul searching. A lifetime of witnessing the horrors of history repeat. Glazer’s drama is set during the Holocaust but it speaks to the present — it is an achievement that required every part of him.

Over the span of four monumental films, Glazer has forged a career that defies easy categorization. But after The Zone of Interest, what is clear is that what connects these films is a man who wants us to see beyond what we are accustomed — to marvel or be terrified by the world that exists just below the surface. To look, unblinking, at what’s been there the whole time.

In The Zone of Interest, Glazer presents fascism as a family affair, complete with the idyllic home, the wife and kids, the prestigious job. We don’t simply watch Rudolf and Hedwig — we inspect them, their focus on status a nightmare mirror of our own petty cravings for comfort and security at the expense of others. Evil is not extraordinary, Glazer tells us — in fact, it’s frighteningly common, and we are all susceptible to the virus.

That’s why he agonized over his masterpiece. The preciseness of tone, the rejection of cliches, the formulation of an ingenious shooting style that indicts rather than glamorizes: It took sensitivity and anger and sorrow and courage. The Zone of Interest is a work of profound moral seriousness. It is also a work of art. It took him a lifetime — may we not take that long to heed its warnings or fully absorb its terrible power.

Please join me in congratulating our winner for Best Director, Mr. Jonathan Glazer.

You can read Glazer's acceptance speech here. The photo is by Matt Harbicht. The Zone of Interest also won Best Picture, which was richly deserved. All the LAFCA winners can be seen here. 

This was the first banquet for the organization I didn't help oversee since 2010, and the new exec board did a smashing job. I've moderated several Q&As with members of the Zone team, so the evening felt like a happy reunion with some good folks. Being able to introduce Susan to Celine Song, our New Generation recipient as writer-director of Past Lives, was another highlight. Susan loves The Zone of Interest and Past Lives as much as I do. (She got to tell Glazer something she's been telling me for a while, which is that Zone may be one of the greatest films she's ever seen. Susan also adores Under the Skin). So, yes, a special night for us both.

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for Blair McClendon, Editor of 'Aftersun'

On Saturday at the Biltmore Hotel, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association held its 48th annual awards banquet. (Our full list of winners is here.) I was honored to present our Best Film Editing prize to Blair McClendon for Aftersun, my pick for 2022's best film. Here's what I said from the stage:

Memories are a way we interpret the world, constantly sifting through faded mental snapshots of what once was in order to reconcile who we’ve become. But our brains are a flawed storage facility housing those stray images and foggy impressions that constitute our entire existence. Memory is all we have, and it’s rarely enough.

Movies are memories, and few have been as piercing as writer-director Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun. And, tonight, we honor her frequent collaborator who helped shape this beautiful meditation, editor Blair McClendon. The movie is about a young girl, named Sophie, who’s on vacation with her father. But the film is constructed to be Sophie’s recollection years later as an adult. She is trying to solve the mystery of who her dad was, although Aftersun doesn’t contain typical, static flashbacks — rather, they seem to be floating, morphing inside Sophie’s head, a rough approximation of past events filtered through emotion and distance. McClendon’s technique may be hard to articulate, but it’s very easy to grasp — we are watching on screen what it means to try to remember.

We experience this vacation in fragments. Crucial scenes are intermixed with seemingly random interludes that are representative of the strange things our brain holds onto. Weaving together Sophie’s past and present, carefully molding sequences so that they feel ephemeral but also incredibly resonant, McClendon achieves with his dreamlike editing something I’ve never seen before: a movie that is, itself, as fragile and elliptical as a memory.

When our mind returns to Aftersun, this extraordinary film comes back to us in emotionally charged snippets — a shot of a brilliant blue sky, an image of a rug, the sad smile of a father doing his best. Every moment tells its own story — every moment becomes its own treasure. Memory is imperfect, but Aftersun is flawless.

Please join me in congratulating our Best Film Editing winner, Blair McClendon.

Photo by Matt Harbicht. Still tickled that Claire Denis was able to attend so we could give her our Career Achievement prize in person. And pleased that Barry Jenkins made the time to be our special surprise guest in her honor.

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for 'Petite Maman'

During December's awards-voting meeting, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association decided to change the name of our foreign-language category, which made me very happy. The award is now the Best Film Not in the English Language, and it went to Petite Maman, which I thought was 2021's best movie. Celine Sciamma's latest hits theaters officially on April 22nd (my wedding anniversary), and I was honored to get to write the film's LAFCA essay. Hope you enjoy.

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for Joshua L. Pearson

Four out of the last six years (and three out of the last four), LAFCA's Best Editing prize has gone to a documentary, which I'm very happy about. Joshua L. Pearson, our Best Editing recipient from Summer of Soul, sent us a nice acceptance video. You can read my essay here.

“Most of us weren’t there, but this documentary makes us feel like we were — and still are.” Read @timgrierson’s essay on LAFCA’s Best Film Editing Award winner Joshua L. Pearson for @summerofsoul: https://t.co/NszRYRF1VW #LAFCAAwards #awardsseason pic.twitter.com/trvRmr2MPj

— Los Angeles Film Critics Association (@LAFilmCritics) March 2, 2022

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for Chloe Zhao

Because of the pandemic, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association did not hold our annual awards banquet. But we still honored our winners. I was very happy to write the essay for our Best Director winner, Chloe Zhao. You can read that here. (And if you'd like to read Zhao's acceptance statement, that's right here.)

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for Noah Baumbach

On Saturday at the InterContinental in Century City, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association held our 45th annual awards banquet. (Our full list of winners is here.) I was honored to present our Best Screenplay prize to Noah Baumbach for Marriage Story. Here's what I said from the stage:

What happens to love when a relationship ends? Does it wither away and die? Or can it evolve into something else?

Those questions are at the heart of Noah Baumbach’s wonderful, wry screenplay about the complexity and anguish of divorce. Yet his movie is called Marriage Story because, even though the main characters, Charlie and Nicole, are splitting up, they aren’t entirely going their separate ways. Because they have a child, their relationship is simply changing — they’re no longer man and wife, but they have to figure out how to still be a family.

Baumbach has always been a sharp, sometimes caustic writer, but in Marriage Story there’s also an incredible amount of compassion and tenderness — alongside some really terrific jokes about Los Angeles. This film does not take sides in its depiction of Charlie and Nicole — we care about both of them, but understand why they don’t fit together anymore.

If the story has a villain, it’s the divorce-industrial complex itself — the lawyers and legal mechanisms that can tear up lives and turn former soul mates against one another, convincing them that they’re better off alone. It’s a miracle anyone gets through that process in one piece. And so we worry about Charlie and Nicole: Amidst the custody battles and screaming matches, can they somehow hold onto what first bonded them so long ago?

An epic of intimacy, Marriage Story pinpoints the small acts of kindness, the nagging insecurities and failures, the flashes of joy and sorrow that make up a relationship — the things we share with another person, even after they’ve moved on. It’s a film about the end of love — and the echoes of love that still linger. It’s very funny but it’s also very bittersweet. It is a movie about marriage, but it’s also a movie about being alive.

"They'll catch the Sondheim reference at the end," Susan assured me. "Don't worry." She was right. Very happy to have Baumbach and Greta Gerwig at our banquet. She accepted our Career Achievement prize for Elaine May, who was unable to attend.

(Photo by Matt Harbicht.)

LAFCA's Best Films of the Decade Poll

Ten years ago, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association did a Best of the 2000s poll of its members: David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. emerged triumphant. Another decade has ended, so here we go again. See our results here (including my essay). And check out the individual ballots (including mine) here.

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for Steven Yeun

On Saturday at the InterContinental in Century City, I was given the enviable task of presenting the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's Best Supporting Actor award to Burning's Steven Yeun. (All our winners, and runners-up, are here.) Here's what I said from the stage:

Movies teach us how to spot monsters. They’re the creatures who have horns on their head or hockey masks on their face. But in real life, they’re not so easy to recognize because they look like us. And sometimes they come bearing a smile. Even worse, they may not be monsters at all—it just depends on your perspective.

Ben, the enigmatic playboy of Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, doesn’t enter the story until the half-hour mark, but once he does, he recalibrates this magnificent film’s internal rhythms. Ben doesn’t achieve this with a machete or an evil plan. All he needs is a noncommittal grin and a slightly condescending air. 

Like so much of Burning, Ben is a bundle of mysteries, whether it’s the origins of his wealth or his intentions with Hae-mi, the film’s leading lady. Those mysteries float and linger within the character, and they’re brought to remarkable life by Steven Yeun.

Yeun plays Ben like a disguise, inviting us to project our own feelings and assumptions onto him. Jong-su, the film’s ostensible hero, views Ben as a romantic rival, and there’s something archetypal about Yeun’s portrayal: For many insecure guys, Ben represents that cooler, more confident and sophisticated man that we can’t ever hope to compete with. But is that superiority? Or is there something far more menacing behind his eyes?

Yeun seduces us in this film, refusing to give up his character’s secrets. Ben could be a psychopath or just a guy who likes torching greenhouses. He may be someone who’s never cried—or just the kind of person who says that to try to impress others. He may be Burning’s monster or maybe its most misunderstood character. Ben’s mysteries remain—but what I know for sure is that Steven Yeun is an absolute killer in this incredible film.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in congratulating our Best Supporting Actor winner, Mr. Steven Yeun.

To have him and director Lee Chang-dong, whose Burning won Best Foreign-Language Film (alongside Shoplifters), in attendance was a thrill. May that film continue to find its audience.

(Photo by Matt Harbicht.)

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for Luca Guadagnino

At Saturday night's Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards banquet, I had the honor of presenting one of our two Best Director prizes to Call Me by Your Name's Luca Guadagnino. (He tied in the voting with Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water, a very different kind of love story. All our winners are here.)

Here are the remarks I made from the stage...

I wish I could see the world through the eyes of Luca Guadagnino. His enrapturing films are filled with the complexity and pleasure of how romance first sparks, then blossoms and then sometimes drifts away. Most directors’ movies merely recreate the sensation of falling in love—his make you wonder if you’ve ever experienced anything quite so real. He depicts love so intensely because he sees life so beautifully. 

Call Me by Your Name continues a sensual and emotional exploration he began in previous movies, most recently I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. But it also feels like a culmination—a wistful summation of our shared desire to make connection with someone, to be seen. Call Me by Your Name never strains for significance, and yet in its quiet, languid chronicling of Elio and Oliver’s budding romance, it’s profound—cosmic, even.   

So, how did he do it? Not even his actors can quite explain this. When Michael Stuhlbarg was asked once about Guadagnino’s methods, he searched for an answer. And then this is what he said: “It’s wonderful filmmaking, what he allows us to see. Look at this weaving path. Look at this leaf. Look at the rain. Look at a waterfall. All of these images, in some perverse and magical language, help tell the story.”   

Since Call Me by Your Name’s premiere at Sundance, critics have tried to encapsulate this film’s poetry, but I think Stuhlbarg’s explanation is the truest. In Call Me by Your Name, Guadagnino gives us new eyes to see the world around us. Every little element matters—love above all else.  

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in congratulating our Best Director winner, Mr. Luca Guadagnino.

When I put together my presentation, Stuhlbarg was actually not scheduled to be in attendance. Saturday morning, I found out he was coming. I was very happy to give him a little shout-out from the stage.

Call Me by Your Name also won Best Picture from the group. A deserving winner, and a very fun night.

(Photo by Matt Harbicht.)

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for Carter Burwell

I realized I had neglected to post this. At last month's Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards banquet, I had the pleasure of presenting the prize for Best Music Score to Carter Burwell for two films, Carol and Anomalisa. Sadly, Mr. Burwell couldn't be there to accept in person -- he was in New York that night at the opening of his wife's solo exhibition -- but I was very happy to give his award to the producers of Carol, who are (from left to right) Stephen Woolley, Elizabeth Karlsen and Christine Vachon. What I'm most proud about in this picture is that I refrained from gushing to Ms. Vachon about how much Safe means to me.

Anyway, here are the remarks I gave from the podium before presenting the award....

Carter Burwell has been a composer for more than 30 years, but in all that time, he really hasn’t scored many love stories. Working chiefly with the Coen brothers, he’s instead specialized in a kind of existential soundscape. You wouldn’t say that his scores are overtly emotional, but they do feel attuned to the mysteries and the richness of life. His music doesn’t tell you how to feel about the movie you’re watching — actually, his intimate, swirling compositions seem as curious about what’s going to happen next in the story as we are.  

Now, this might explain why his scores for Carol and Anomalisa are so piercing. These movies are love stories, but they’re cautious ones. And so Burwell provides suitably restrained but longing scores — like the movies’ characters, his music seems to be slowly waking up to the dream of a love that can last. And they’re remarkably different scores: Carol’s incorporates muted, exquisite pianos and strings. In Anomalisa, it’s practically a chamber piece that’s as handmade and fragile as the movie’s stop-motion puppets.  

In life, it can be hard to express ourselves authentically to people we’re just meeting, especially if we’re falling in love with that person and don’t know how he or she feels about us. Likewise, the characters in Carol and Anomalisa — for myriad reasons — have to be careful what they say. But that’s no problem: Carter Burwell speaks for them, and he speaks beautifully.  

All our winners (and runners-up) are here. The above photo was taken by the stellar Matt Harbicht.

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'

Considering that Boyhood was my pick for 2014's best film, you can imagine that I was disappointed that it didn't win Best Picture last night at the Oscars. My other great sadness, however, came from the fact that Wes Anderson didn't walk away with Best Original Screenplay for The Grand Budapest Hotel, although that film did win four other prizes. (And, yes, Boyhood was also nominated in that category.)

I decided to reprint my speech I wrote for Anderson when I gave out the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's Best Screenplay prize to him back in early January. This encapsulates what I love about the film....

The Grand Budapest Hotel is about the stories we tell. Filled with characters who are authors or poets or simply old men reflecting on their lives over dinner, Wes Anderson’s film is consumed with the passage of time and how we chronicle it -- how we make sense of it through narratives, or personas that we invent for ourselves. Divided into novelistic chapters and spread out over different decades, The Grand Budapest Hotel may be Anderson’s most ambitious work yet. It is certainly his most poignant.  

But that’s not what you think of first. What you remember about The Grand Budapest Hotel is how funny it is. Working from a story he co-wrote with Hugo Guinness, Anderson has given us one of his richest creations in Gustave, a concierge so impeccably elegant he never suspects how ridiculous he is. Played to comedic perfection by Ralph Fiennes, Gustave embodies many of the traits we have come to love in Anderson’s films: that proud sense of individualism; that defiantly optimistic view of the world that no amount of cruel reality can squash.   

This is Anderson’s eighth feature, and one of his very best. If this film were a book, it would be a page-turner: part thriller, part war drama, part comedy, part romantic fable. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a splendid confection, an exquisite fantasy -- and to quote one of the character’s assessment of Gustave, Wes Anderson sustains the illusion with a marvelous grace.  

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in congratulating our Best Screenplay winner, Mr. Wes Anderson.

My LAFCA Awards Presentation for 'Blue Is the Warmest Color'

On January 11, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association held our annual awards banquet. During the event, an individual critic presents an award for a film, performance or craftsperson. (Our full list of winners is here.) I was honored to give our Best Foreign-Language Film prize to Blue Is the Warmest Color and its director, Abdellatif Kechiche. I've been championing the movie since Cannes, so this was a thrill.

Kechiche was in attendance for our event, as was his lead actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, who tied for Best Actress with Blue Jasmine's Cate Blanchett. Each presenter is advised to take no more than 90 seconds. (We prefer having our winners speak, not us long-winded critics.) Here was what I had to say about Blue Is the Warmest Color from the podium....

Good Evening.  

Since it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, Blue Is the Warmest Color has been one of the year’s most discussed and debated movies. But for those of us who fell in love with director Abdellatif Kechiche’s romantic drama, all the noise surrounding this film has never threatened to drown out the gentle, beautiful story that he and his actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux have crafted.  

Loosely adapted from a graphic novel, Blue Is the Warmest Color is about a young woman named Adele’s coming of age. But it’s also a love story, one filled with tenderness and eroticism that gives us a full sense of two individuals growing together and coming apart over the course of several years. Wise and melancholy, this film hurts like real life. And yet watching Blue Is the Warmest Color is invigorating: Kechiche has taken the seemingly mundane building blocks of everyday experience — falling in love, finding our purpose — and he’s created something singular and profound.   

This movie is the triumph of an observant, curious filmmaker, but it’s also a triumph for his actresses and their committed, compassionate performances. Like so many of the best films, Blue Is the Warmest Color transcends language just as it transcends geography. Man or woman, straight or gay, whatever our nationality, we saw ourselves up there on the screen in Adele and her girlfriend Emma’s journey. We share in these characters’ happiness, we worry when they hit tough times, and when the film is over, we wish them nothing but the best — even if that means they won’t end up together.   

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in congratulating the director of our Best Foreign Language Film winner, Mr. Abdellatif Kechiche.

(Photo of Mr. Kechiche and me courtesy of the very talented Shiloh Strong.)

'Mr. Nobody' Review

Mr. Nobody has had a difficult journey to distribution in the U.S. After premiering in Venice in 2009, the movie (from Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael) got released in other countries but not America. In fact, it wasn't until 2011 that Mr. Nobody screened in the U.S. -- and that was due to the efforts of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's Films That Got Away committee, of which I'm a proud member. We programmed the film for that summer's Los Angeles Film Festival, and it was a huge hit with a predominantly younger crowd. That was understandable: Mr. Nobody's themes of chance and fate (mixed with some pretty great sci-fi effects) resonate with twentysomethings on the cusp of their own adulthood. Jared Leto is the star of the film, and he's quite good in it. As for the movie itself, my review is up at Paste.

Breaking Down the Sight & Sound Poll

This week was the official unveiling of the latest Sight & Sound poll results. (My predictions, at least for the critics, were pretty accurate. The directors were a little more surprising.) For Deadspin, I crunched some numbers and offered some analysis. What I didn't do was try to figure out what it all "means." Ever since I've become a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, I'm much more sensitive to this idea that poll results say something about a particular group. Speaking for my fellow LAFCA members, we're such a bunch of ornery individuals that we're completely uninterested in sending some sort of message through our end-of-the-year awards. I find it hard to believe, therefore, that a collection of critics and directors living all over the globe are unified in a way for their collective results to "mean" anything other than, hey, these are the movies they consider the greatest. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, let the obsessiveness begin.

the 2011 LAFCA awards banquet

A good time was had by all on January 15, 2011, as the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored the best films and performances of 2010. My full recap of the event, which isn't televised, can be found here.

'the social network' wins best picture for lafca

Starting at around 10:00 this morning, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association cast our votes for the year's best films and performances. Here's the full list of winners and runners-up: I'm pretty pleased with how it all turned out. When I came home from the meeting, my wife said she was really surprised I Am Love didn't end up with a single mention. You know, I sorta am too.

los angeles film critics pick films of the decade

In preparation for our annual awards banquet, which is being held this Saturday, LAFCA members voted for their films of the decade. You can see the full results, including individual ballots, here. It's been more than eight years since I saw our winner -- it may be time for a fresh viewing.

'the hurt locker' wins best picture from LAFCA

The member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association met today to pick the best films and performances of 2009. Here's what we came up with. And here's my review of The Hurt Locker from over the summer.

my new job title

Now that it's on the website for all to see, I can formally acknowledge that, yes, I'm the new vice president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It's a real honor for me. The membership of LAFCA are a passionate, terrific bunch, and I just hope I do them proud.

The other three officers I'll be working with are people I like and respect a lot, and I'm looking forward to being part of the gang. (They've all been officers before, which makes me the New Guy, I suppose.) The business of film criticism is in dire straits these days, but I have to say I always feel better about things when I'm at LAFCA meetings. Being around such opinionated men and women, one can't help but think that this profession won't go down without a fight.