Film Critics Award `Blood' Top Honors

Jan 06, 07:04 PM

NEW YORK - There will be awards. At its 42nd annual awards meeting last night, the National Society of Film Critics named "There Will Be Blood" Best Picture of the Year, and the film's maker, Paul Thomas Anderson ("Boogie Nights," "Magnolia," "Punch- Drunk Love") was named Best Director. A period epic chronicling the life and times of a California oil magnate, "There Will Be Blood" has been compared to such classics as "Citizen Kane" and "Days of Heaven."

Daniel Day-Lewis was named Best Actor for his portrayal of Daniel Plainview, a biblical patriarch driven to crush both his rivals and his actual and spiritual sons. Anderson's screenplay, adapted from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!," came in second to Tamara Jenkins' script for the blackly comic "The Savages." Cinematographer Robert Elswit rounded out "Blood's" four wins.

Several films, notably none of them box-office blockbusters, vied for top honors. The Coen brothers' existential prairie thriller "No Country for Old Men," honored by numerous other critics' organizations, came away empty-handed here, though it was a contender in almost every category. "No Country" was joined by Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" as runner-up for Best Picture. Similarly, in the Best Director category, the Coens and Schnabel were hot on the heels of winner Anderson.

Boston's Casey Affleck won Best Supporting Actor for his role as the infamous outlaw killer in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." Praised for her portrayal of a dissolute Dorchester single mother in "Gone Baby Gone," the debut film by Affleck's brother Ben, Amy Ryan fell short of the Best Supporting Actress honors she's won elsewhere. That prize went to Cate Blanchett for her incarnation of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' mythobiography "I'm Not There."

Julie Christie, winner of the Best Actress Oscar in 1965 for "Darling," is proving a serious contender this awards season for her role as a woman succumbing to Alzheimer's disease in "Away From Her," the feature-film directing debut of young actress Sarah Polley. The heartbreak of Christie's performance is that her luminous beauty has only deepened over the years. The National Society of Film Critics named her Best Actress.

The winner of Best Foreign Film was Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," a dark drama about two women attempting to obtain an abortion in the waning days of communism. Best Nonfiction Film went to Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight," a coruscating documentary detailing the dysfunctional execution of America's invasion of Iraq.

Originally published by By JAMES VERNIERE.

(c) 2008 Boston Herald. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. Film Critics Award `Blood' Top Honors
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