by Cynthia Wisehart
"I don’t usually get this hammered," Jack Nicholson says slyly as he takes the mic to accept his 2002 Critics’ Choice award for Best Actor, "especially when it’s on TV."
Nicholson shared his award for About Schmidt with fellow nominee Daniel Day-Lewis, who also won for his portrayal of William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting in Gangs of New York. With a dangerous-looking wave of the arm, Nicholson summoned the third Best Actor nominee and "loser," Robin Williams, to the stage, a move that must have made the E! Networks producer thankful for tape delay. As Day-Lewis stood aside elegantly, the two icons launched into a long, giddy, conspiratorial improv that was the stuff of awards show legend.
That same year, the Critics’ Choice Awards continued to be a barometer of what the Academy of Motion Pictures would do when it came time to vote for the Oscars: The Critics’ Choice Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress/Actor prefaced unorthodox Oscar wins for Chicago, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Chris Cooper. Of all the Critics’ Choice nominees in the Best Picture, Directing, and Acting categories, only Robin Williams and Steven Spielberg did not go on to Oscar nominations. Even Oscar’s controversial nod to Eminem for Best Song and Michael Moore’s win for Bowling for Columbine were foreshadowed at the 2003 Critics’ Choice Awards, as was the Academy’s unexpected award to Spirited Away for Best Animated Picture.
The following year, the ninth annual Critics’ Choice Awards predicted 100 percent of the winners for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Animated Feature with awards to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Charlize Theron, Sean Penn, Renee Zellweger, Tim Robbins, Peter Jackson, The Barbarian Invasions, and Finding Nemo. This time, the critics’ appreciation for non-traditional songs ("A Mighty Wind") was not equally shared by the Academy (the song did receive a nomination). However, both bodies agreed on the Best Score of the Year - Howard Shore’s sweeping composition for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
The Critics’ Choice Awards are selected by the most populist-minded of the country’s film critics, a position that often makes them the butt of movie marketing jokes and the target of some particularly vitriolic prose. Sometimes characterized as the "junket press," Critics’ Choice voters are nonetheless the first voices most filmgoers hear on new releases - via television, radio, or Internet - and the association members take that relationship seriously. As a group, the broadcast critics see more films than any other critics’ association, and their record for gauging what the Academy will do is statistically significant. For example, between 1997 and 2004, the Critics’ Choice nominations predicted all but two of 35 Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. By comparison, the Golden Globes were three times more likely to go different way during the same period.
Of course, although the critics’ mid-December nominations and the early January awards anticipate the Oscars to a remarkable degree, they can also be counted on for a few independent-minded twists. If you’re a Joan Allen fan, you already know that.
In December 1995, when broadcast film critics Joey Berlin and Rod Lurie decided to launch a Hollywood awards show, they had three weeks to work with and a 10-year plan already in mind. "We planned to make it onto network television, we wanted to rival the Golden Globes," Berlin says simply, and a decade hence, that’s exactly what’s happened. Early on, Lurie cited Fran?ois Truffaut’s statement about being interested only in films that demonstrated "the joy of filmmaking or the trauma of filmmaking," and suggested that the Critics’ Choice criteria would run along similar lines.
That first year