Quotes of the Day

Oh, our readers revere us — while calling us heartless when we don't like a film they love, and snobbish when we like a film they wouldn't care to see. Our publishers cherish our expertise, although they'd rather print profiles of stars than reviews of the movies they're in. The big movie studios are crazy about us — although they keep us out of screenings that every other staffer on the newspaper or magazine is invited to.

That's the lot of a film critic 11 months of the year. (And mind you, it's still a great job: seeing movies and writing about them.) But come December we finally have a function that other people can appreciate. Friends ask which of the big Christmas offerings they should spend their money on. Our media outlets find space for lavishly illustrated reviews. Studio flacks plead with us to come to an Early Unveiling of a Very Special Film. From January to November our presence at a screening is thought to be harmful to the play a movie gets in our publications. But in December our reviews, and more important our votes in the critics' groups, are seen as the best kind of free publicity.

For this is the season of critics' prizes. In the past five days, five groups have convened to choose what they think are the best films, filmmakers and performances of the year. Soon our encomiums will be plastered all over the newspapers In today's New York Times you'll find ad for The Queen, the film about the British Royal Family's reaction to Princess Diana's death: "WINNER... Best Actress... Best Screenplay... New York Film Critics Circle." Word of our decisions will lodge in the brains of Academy members. And if they don't, the studios will remind them with daily double-truck ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

You see, the 6,000 Oscar voters don't have time to catch up with the hundreds of films eligible for nomination. After all, we see movies for a living; they just make them. They need an early line, a cheat sheet, voices of presumed expertise steering them toward certain films and, just as important, away from lots of others. Critics, at award time, are the wheat-chaff separators.

I'm a member of the New York group, which met Monday to choose its best. The job is simple: tear yellow-lined paper into cracker-size bits; write a name or three on one piece; wait while the names are read out and tabulated; vote again and again; finally reach a consensus in this category; and go back to square one. It's about as much fun as filling out an income-tax form, though less fraught with drama. Indeed, the only excitement yesterday came in the Best Film voting, when The Queen and United 93, which reconstructs some of the chaos and heroism of 9/11, were tied after four ballots. A brief debate arose: Should we vote yet again, or proclaim the two films joint winners? After all, said the Village Voice's Jim Hoberman, "they're the same film."

A vote was taken, and United 93 won by a slim margin. Which might be thought to speak to the home-team strain in this year's voting. We New Yorkers chose a movie about events that left a hole in the city that still hasn't been filled. The Boston Society of Film Critics picked Martin Scorsese's The Departed, which was shot in Boston. And the Los Angeles Film Critics Association went for Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, shot in California. But don't make too much of local favorites. The New York Online Film Critics chose The Queen, and the National Board of Review — no one seems to know who the members are, but they vote in New York — selected Iwo Jima. (You can find the full lists of winners on the groups' respective websites.)

This gives Hollywood three films to see and debate, Others may be added: Babel, Dreamgirls, Pedro Almodovar's Volver — maybe the indie hit Little Miss Sunshine. That could be a dark horse like last year's Crash, which all the critics' groups except Chicago's ignored, the better to celebrate Brokeback Mountain. The field's more open this year. In the New York Film Critics' voting, the 12 awards went to 11 different films; only The Queen won two. And though we weren't thinking about it, the 11 films had 10 different distributors; only Warner Bros. had two winners (The Departed and Happy Feet).

In years with no clear front-runner, the Academy membership needs to consult critics' prizes with even greater care. So the Oscar voters will listen to us. How do I know? Because they usually do. And how do I know that? I have the research to back me up.

Here's what I did. I looked at the last four years of awards from five critics' groups: Boston, L.A., the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics' Circle. In each group I tallied looked the so-called six major categories — film, director, actor, actress, supporting actor and supporting actress — to see which awards matched with the Academy's. To these I applied a computation system so complex that only Bill James and his sabermetricians could understand or appreciate: two points for each critics' choice that won an Oscar, one point for each choice that got nominated, and none if the film or person was shut out. I call it the Oscrit scale.

In almost all cases, the critics' groups had anticipated Oscar nominations at least half of the time, and they often foretold the winners. Last year, for instance, the Boston group gave prizes to three who would be Academy winners (Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote as best actor, Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line as best actress, and Ang Lee for directing Brokeback Mountain) and three that didn't win but were nominated (Brokeback Mountain as best film, Paul Giamatti in Cinderella Man for supporting actor and Catherine Keener in Capote for supporting actress). Of the L.A. critics' prizes, two went to eventual Oscar winners and the other four to Oscar nominees. Et cetera.

Over the four years of my survey, the best predictor of Oscar glory was the National Society of Film Critics (with 27 points on the Oscrit scale), followed by the National Board of Review (25), L.A. (24), Boston (23) and New York (20). Perhaps the NSFC has an advantage because it votes in early January, long after the other critics have convened. That group has three or four weeks to sniff out the zeitgeist and, more important, get a perspective on the serious holiday films the rest of us have been shown in early December and have little time to reflect on.

Once in a while the critics' awards will have little overlap with the Oscar nominations. It happens when critics go crazy for some genre-bending effort — like Far from Heaven in 2002 or A History of Violence last year — that most Academy members just don't get. But that's the exception, not the rule. In general, all five groups are reliable forecasters of Oscar nominations.

Over the next few weeks, the publicity people will crank up their machinery around our prizes. The winners will rehearse the speeches they'll give at our awards parties, always saving the best lines in case, just in case, they need them on Oscar Night (Feb. 25). And we critics crawl back in our holes, happy at the anonymity. You see, we don't think it's our job to herald the Academy nominations. We're mainly interested in writing judiciously about the medium we love, and noodging people to challenge themselves, once in a while, at the movies.

Getting readers to see, and think about, good films: that's our reward, and award.

• Richard Corliss
• Yep, once a year, when they give their awards and start fanning the Oscar flame