The Women Film Critics Circle held their annual Awards Ceremony on January 8th. The Ceremony was broadcast live on WBAI Radio, with WFCC members, award winners and guests.

DISFIGURED: WFCC COURAGE IN ACTING AWARD 2008

TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW, CLICK HERE

The Women Film Critics Circle is an association of 46 women film critics and scholars from around the country, who are involved in print, radio, online and TV broadcast media. They came together five years ago to form the first women critics organization ever in the country, in the belief that women’s perspectives and voices in film criticism need to be recognized fully. WFCC also prides itself on being the most culturally and racially diverse critics group in the country by far, and best reflecting the diversity of movie audiences.

THE WOMEN FILM CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2008

BEST MOVIE ABOUT WOMEN
Changeling

BEST MOVIE BY A WOMAN
Frozen River

BEST STORYTELLER [Screenwriting Award]
Jennifer Lumet: Rachel Getting Married

BEST ACTRESS
Melissa Leo: Frozen River

BEST ACTOR
Mickey Rourke: The Wrestler

BEST YOUNG ACTRESS
Abigail Breslin: Kit Kittredge and Definitely Maybe

BEST COMEDIC ACTRESS: *TIE*
Sally Hawkins: Happy-Go-Lucky
Meryl Streep: Mamma Mia!

BEST FOREIGN FILM
I’ve Loved You So Long

BEST FEMALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE
The Secret Life Of Bees

BEST UNRELEASED MOVIE
How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer

BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES
Nothing But The Truth

BEST MUSIC
Cadillac Records

BEST ANIMATED FEMALE
Eve: WALL-E

BEST FAMILY FILM
WALL-E

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Meryl Streep

ACTING AND ACTIVISM: Natalie Portman

**ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: For a film that most passionately opposes violence against women:
Changeling

**JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: For best expressing the woman of color experience in America:
Ballast

**KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity:
Battle In Seattle

COURAGE IN ACTING:
Deidra Edwards in DisFigured: For redefining conventional standards of female physical beauty and pride on screen, and promoting positive images of big bodied women.

BEST DOCUMENTARIES:

GROUNDBREAKER:
A Walk To Beautiful: Mary Olive Smith

ABOVE AND BEYOND:
Wings Of Defeat: Risa Morimoto

COURAGE IN FILMMAKING:
Traces Of The Trade: Katrina Browne

MOST OFFENSIVE MALE CHARACTERS
Choke: Sam Rockwell’s lewd leading man sexaholic, may be the first on screen designated dirty young man ever.

Hell Ride: Larry Bishop carries a torch for the opposite sex, and not in that way.

Role Models: Paul Rudd and Sean William Scott master the dumbing down downer, while dabbling in the ‘dickish dick’ syndrome and man/boy boobie love.

Towelhead: Aaron Eckhart’s graphic take on the unhealthy male psyche in America, from sexual abuse and racism to foreign aggression.

Zack And Miri Make a Porno: Jason Mewes matches dirty talk kid antics with Swallow My Cockuccino porn smut method acting.

TOP TEN HALL OF SHAME
The Hottie and the Nottie: The female world according to Paris, and existing only inside Hilton’s head, that standing deliberately beside every gorgeous and irresistible babe is a total female dog, sporting acne, rotting teeth, hairy bod, and furry toes.

Hounddog: While the sexualization on screen of then twelve year old actress Dakota Fanning is dismissed by the filmmaker and some anti-rape organizations because it’s intended to focus on a grave crime, one hand washing the other is not the point.

House Of The Sleeping Beauties: More aptly titled, Sexually Desirable When Drugged, the film allows lewd elderly director Vadim Glowna to star himself as molester and rapist of a series of nude adolescent slumbering sex slaves. A romanticized and lusty aesthetic portrayal of date rape.

The Life Before Her Eyes: In other words, a woman’s place is in the delivery room. Not exactly a road movie, but certainly an anti-abortion mandatory teen motherhood guilt trip. All that’s missing are the pamphlet tables in the theater lobbies.

Made Of Honor: To hell with safe sex, as a supremely horny lecherous guy gets to be Prince Charming husband material. A womanizer’s guide to wedded bliss.

The Family That Preys: Battered wife slugging as comic relief. Ha Ha.

Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired: A premeditated act of promotional propaganda masquerading as a balanced documentary. And in the service of exonerating – with a creative genius defense – the noted fugitive from justice filmmaker’s rape of a drugged female child.

Savage Grace: Julianne Moore’s really Bad Mommy among the many crowding the screen this year once again, as her too much information bored socialite hits on her teen son. A depressing and meaningless tabloid cinema smutty glimpse into the depraved family lives of stuffy rich and infamous designer couch potatoes.

The Women: Sex, Lies And Shopping, as filthy rich leisure class females lament their personal woes as victims, not so much of men, but of workingclass women.

Zack And Miri Make A Porno: See Most Offensive Males above.

**ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Adrienne Shelly was a promising actress and filmmaker who was brutally strangled in her apartment in 2006 at the age of forty by a construction worker in the building, after she complained about noise. Her killer tried to cover up his crime by hanging her from a shower20rack in her bathroom, to make it look like a suicide. He later confessed that he was having a “bad day.” Shelly, who left behind a baby daughter, had just completed her film Waitress, which she also starred in, and which was honored at Sundance after her death.

**JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: The daughter of a laundress and a musician, Baker overcame being born black, female and poor, and marriage at age fifteen, to become an internationally acclaimed legendary performer, starring in the films Princess Tam Tam, Moulin Rouge and Zou Zou. She also survived the race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois as a child, and later expatriated to France to escape US racism. After participating heroically in the underground French Resistance during WWII, Baker returned to the US where she was a crusader for racial equality. Her activism led to attacks against her by reporter Walter Winchell who denounced her as a communist, leading her to wage a battle against him. Baker was instrumental in ending segregation in many theaters and clubs, where she refused to perform unless integration was implemented.

**KAREN MORLEY AWARD: Karen Morley was a promising Hollywood star in the 1930s, in such films as Mata Hari and Our Daily Bread. She was driven out of Hollywood for her leftist political convictions by the Blacklist and for refusing to testify against other actors, while Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden were informants against her. And also for daring to have a child and become a mother, unacceptable for f emale stars in those days. Morley maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.

WOMEN FILM CRITICS CIRCLE
WFCC.wordpress.com
Criticalwomen@gmail.com