Film critics play role of anti-Oscar

For the 16th year in a row, I recently traveled to New York City for a big movie critics’ confab: the annual vote of the National Society of Film Critics.

The weather was splendid, and at Sardi’s restaurant, under walls covered with vintage showbiz caricatures (from Lionel Barrymore to Whoopi Goldberg), around a white-clothed table that sat 26, where I sat squeezed between the New Yorker’s David Denby and longtime Boston Globe (now freelance) critic Jay Carr, we spent the afternoon honoring some offbeat choices and some more mainstream ones -- at least among movie critics.

Scribbling our top three choices for 11 categories on scraps of paper, dropping them in two cookie canisters, as our often droll president, Peter Rainer (of New York magazine), read off the results, we wound up choosing the comic-jazzy-docu-drama Harvey Pekar bio-movie “American Splendor” as best film of 2003.

We also picked Charlize Theron, the serial killer of “Monster,” as best actress; Bill Murray, the disillusioned movie star of “Lost in Translation,” as best actor; Clint Eastwood, helmer of that model modern noir “Mystic River,” as best director; and the mordant Finnish skid-row fable “The Man Without a Past” as best foreign language film.

I always feel a twinge of nostalgia at our meetings. I remember being the younger, more callow guy in the old Algonquin Hotel banquet room in 1988, so excited to be sitting at the same table as Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael or trading cracks with Richard Corliss. But I no longer feel, as I once did, that our vote is a valuable precursor of possible Oscar winners or nominees -- or even that it should be.

Actually, film critics group “best” votes -- and there are quite a few by now, all over the country -- should never be taken as Oscar bellwethers. That equally overestimates the importance of the Oscars and downplays the value of the critics’ ballots.

They’re something else: a reflection not of the tastes of the film-industry artisans and artists but of professional critics -- of people trying to express a more idealized, crankier, sometimes more polemical view of the movies.

Critics’ prizes come from people who see films for a living and who therefore see more of them, see them more often and have a vaster fund of film knowledge than all but the most obsessed filmmakers (Martin Scorsese) or devoted fans.

So critics’ prizes shouldn’t be viewed as preludes to the Oscars -- though they occasionally intersect. (In the National Society of Film Critics, that’s rarely. In all the years I’ve attended, we’ve agreed with the academy only twice on the best picture: 1992’s “Unforgiven” and 1993’s “Schindler’s List”). They should be riskier, more esoteric, more surprising.

They should be closer to anti-Oscars: votes almost defiantly unconcerned with commerce, box office or the image of the industry, votes that often go to independents, occasionally to foreign pictures (like 2000’s “Yi-Yi” or 1985’s “Ran”) and that usually try to reward unusual artistry, ambition and good intentions.

Hence “American Splendor.” Here is a film that flies in the face of every usual Oscar consideration. It’s not a big hit, not a good-looking picture, not a political “message” film, not a movie that can be cited as a credit to the industry -- except by critics. Writer-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who also took the National Society of Film Critics’ screenwriting award, used an inventive style that blended documentary techniques, imitation comic book panels (with speech balloons and occasional Robert Crumb illustrations) and moody dramatic scenes to take us inside Pekar’s head. (He was played by both character actor Paul Giamatti, with a constant Pekar-esque frown, and by Pekar himself.)

Why did it (barely) beat “Mystic River” and (more decisively) “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”?

Partly it’s because the film’s Harvey Pekar is the kind of guy many of us know and could easily recognize, so dissimilar from the run-of-the-mill hunk heroes that crowd our movies that, by comparison, he seems a living, breathing, crotchety human. To some of us, “American Splendor” is real life, “The Lord of the Rings” is fantasy and “Mystic River” melodrama -- and that reality gives it an edge. That may be the Achilles’ heel of most film critics: We’re so determined not to be swayed by hype that we sometimes become too suspicious of what pleases the masses.

Partly though, it’s because of the way the critics’ society’s vote is structured. We have 55 members, but after a first ballot, if the lead film doesn’t win a plurality of the membership, the proxies drop out and the prize is decided by the people in the room: usually less than half of the total membership.

So once the proxies drop out, the voting becomes strategic. On the second ballot I immediately switched my first-place vote, from my favorite, “Lord of the Rings,” to “Mystic River,” because it had the better chance to win. But the people in the room, by the slightest of margins, finally preferred “Splendor” to “Mystic” -- even though “Mystic” was the darker film and the more stingingly critical.

After a while, it seemed that “Splendor” had become the Howard Dean of “best picture” candidates right now: a rallying point for anti-establishment voters fed up with the studios and the business as usual. But I don’t want to stereotype my own profession; “Lord of the Rings” won the New York, Dallas-Fort Worth and Washington, D.C., critics’ prizes and had fervent supporters in my group. But though they were too few -- not enough to win over those members who saw it simply as Hollywood spectacle -- I’m sure “The Lord of the Rings” will triumph in history’s longer view, often kinder to movie spectacles and box-office triumphs.

I felt something different this time as I left the meeting. Perhaps it was melancholy -- in an atmosphere where I should have been happy. New York City was snowless and warm, Broadway was broad and inviting, people were still eating out of doors in Greenwich Village. After a while, my spirits picked up again.

But back at the beginning, it was different. The annual meetings were attended by two sometimes contentious giants, Kael and Sarris; Kael’s acolytes -- the so-called Paulettes -- used to cluster around her. There was real warfare between those groups -- and sometimes a moment of high drama, such as the time, recalled at this year’s meeting by the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern, when the acidulous John Simon drove much-admired Manny Farber from the room with a cruel crack about his mental health.

Now, everything seems more democratic. And as a good democrat -- small d -- I’ve always believed in exercising my vote, even if the election looks rigged. That goes for national votes as well as movie ones. In the former, I vote as an admiring citizen, in the latter as an admirer of “Citizen Kane.” Over the years, those two civic duties have begun to merge in my mind -- which is why I really don’t mind that the Howard Dean of movies beat my favorites, the “King” and the “River,” this year.

Michael Wilmington is movie critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.