Dallas Film Critics Pick No Country For Old Men As Year's Best

Dallas Film Critics have announced their year-end awards, and like critics everywhere else, they like boring, inaccessible movies that they saw no more than five minutes ago. The Dallas Fort Worth Film Critics Association and its 32 members have picked No Country For Old Men as the best movie of the year, in their 14th annual poll of local member critics, including me.

No Country For Old Men was one of the ten movies I nominated to the DFWFCA, so I guess I have to be happy it won, even if it’s a predictable pick. It’s a good movie, and in addition to winning the DFWFCA’s Best Picture, it earned Joel and Ethan Coen Best Director and Javier Bardem Best Supporting Actor. Also good is There Will Be Blood, which earned Daniel Day-Lewis the DFWFCA’s Best Actor award.

Less good however is Michael Clayton, a boring, pointless affair which Dallas critics rewarded for being tedious and audience un-friendly by tapping Tilda Swinton as the year’s best supporting actor. It could have been worse, at least George Clooney didn’t win Best Actor for simply staring blankly into the camera.

I guess I’m a little disappointed that we Dallas critics always end up voting for and nominating the same movies that get awarded by critics groups in LA and New York. That and very few of the movies I actually vote for ever get any attention. Sure I nominated No Country For Old Men, but it was somewhere down at number nine or ten on my nomination list. I was really rooting for The Lookout or Black Snake Moan, which like every movie not released in November or December, everyone seems to have forgotten exists.

The one DFWFCA pick that isn't boring and really blows my mind is the winner for Best Documentary. Maybe its because this is Texas and people here have this whole red state bias against Michael Moore, but we picked a movie about a guy playing outdated arcade games over the most important, life-changing movie of the year: Sicko. That’s right, the Dallas Fort Worth Film Critics Association picked King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters as the year’s Best Documentary over Sicko. Sicko, the movie that quite literally prompted Dallas area residents to form passionate political rallies in the lobby outside the theater. Sicko had a huge impact on everyone who saw it, not just nationally but here locally in Dallas in particular. Apparently we think a silly documentary about wasting quarters is better. Alright guys, scuse me while I back away from the rest of you on this one. For the record, I voted for Sicko until my keyboard caught fire.

So here’s the full list of this year’s DFWFCA Award winners. I suppose I had some hand in them, but not much of one since nothing I wanted ever wins. It’s kind of like voting for a democratic presidential candidate in Texas. Go ahead, throw your vote away! Check the full list of winners:

Best Picture: No Country For Old Men