2008 Utah Film Critics Association Winners
Best Picture
The Dark Knight
(runner-up: Rachel Getting Married)
Best Achievement in Directing
Andrew Stanton, WALL-E
(runner-up: Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight)
Best Lead Performance by an Actor
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
(runners-up: Richard Jenkins, The Visitor; Sean Penn, Milk)
Best Lead Performance by an Actress
Melissa Leo, Frozen River
(runner-up: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married)
Best Supporting Performance by an Actor
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
(no runner-up)
Best Supporting Performance by an Actress
Rosemarie DeWitt, Rachel Getting Married
(runners-up: Frances McDormand, Burn After Reading; Misty Upham, Frozen River; Evan Rachel Wood, The Wrestler)
Best Screenplay
Jenny Lumet, Rachel Getting Married
(runner-up: Robert Siegel, The Wrestler)
Best Documentary Feature
Man on Wire
(runners-up: Encounters at the End of the World; Waltz with Bashir)
Best Non-English Language Feature
Let the Right One In
(runner-up: Waltz with Bashir)
Best Animated Feature
WALL-E
(runner-up: Kung Fu Panda)
No Response for "Dark Knight Wins Utah Film Critics"
The Best Director bit kind of shakes things up, doesn’t it? I really hope all this love will boost Wall-E. I just really want people to honor the best film regardless whether it’s foreign or live-action or animated.
I’m such an optimist.
PS: Nice on the “no runner-up” for Heath. Oscar is so deservedly his.
YES! Finally the Dark Knight get some well-needed love. And nice to see Melissa Leo on here.
Alright. So… I’ll bite.
Was the no runner-up for BSA a deliberate F-U to any particular performer? Brolin? Shannon?
no runner up? brolin imo gave just as powerful of a performance. psh in doubt is also outstanding.
weird….
otherwise pretty good list. nice to see rosemarie dewitt winning a few here and there. she gave quite the performance.
YES! Evan Rachel Wood has been much underappreciated and she really is a big part of what makes The Wrestler great. I’d have her on the BSA short list myself, but that ain’t happening.
My favorite set of winners so far… I’d love Stanton being nom’d for Wall-E.
Utah? Oh, yes, that place where those lovely Mormons came from who spent millions campaigning to proliferate homophobia in California. Gosh. Milk has no wins? I am in utter shock.
j…
Milk is actually a way overrated film. I’m gay, and it’s not a big deal, neither the performances are. Brolin is getting his supporting actor praise mostly ’cause he was overlooked last year for No Country for Old Men – or his hilarious performance in Planet Terror – and they don’t have place to award his “W.” performance. Sean Penn… well, he’s Sean Penn and anything he does and that is a bit showy gets instant awards attention. But Milk, while not a bad movie at all, is the wagon everybody feels they have to jump in for a variety of reasons. The one is not cool to say anything against. Well, color me unimpressed by van Sant’s last antic.
I still don’t get the Rachel Getting Married biz. That movie was the apotheosis of crap.
I am so happy to see Andrew Stanton popping up, his direction in Wall-E was amazing, he made that movie what it is.
lmao at the no runner up for ledger!!
The “no-runner up” bit is incredibly lame.
Perhaps ALL the voters voted for Ledger and there was no runner-up because there were no votes for other candidates? This is the only explanation in my mind…
The “no runner-up” bit is NOT incredibly lame, I think it’s sensible and wonderful. It shows that everyone voted for Heath Ledger and he won it fair and square. To call it lame means people who voted for him were biased.
No runner-up tells me that there was nobody even close. Either it was unanimous, or the second-place finisher had a paltry number of votes. I don’t think 3 or 4 votes should qualify an actor as second best performance of the year.
oh look…Let the Right One In and Man on Wire….shocking.
Wonderful to finally see ANDREW STANTON named, as WALL-E is the year’s best film for sure, and it didn’t direct itself. I expected that at some point during this run of critics’ awards that THE DARK KNIGHT would get recognition from at least one group. Interesting that RACHEL was the runner-up.
I think No Runner-Up is incredibly pretentious and plain stupid, what are they trying to say? Though I’ll be fine with it if its just a statistical thing.
The no-runner up deal to me means that Ledger was the unanimous choice on the panel.
Ledger, so far, is the closest thing we have to a lock on Oscar night.
AJ – there’s an interesting point there. Surely we can predict Man on Wire winning the doc award, but what in the world is going to happen with the Swedish Vampire Movie (SVM)? Even with the “oops” clause, the SVM is not eligible for the Foreign Language Oscar, the only thing it would be eligible for would be BP, and while I would be ecstatic, I cannot see that happening in this reality.
I guess, what happens with the SVM is, sadly, nothing.
Yep. The Dark Knight is gonna get nominated.
Rosemarie DeWitt gets some love!!!
she is simply gorgeous!
settle down. it’s utah.
This is the 2nd BP win for TDK (Austin). It has 2 along with Milk & I think Button. Frost/Nixon has 1. Wall-E has 3, and the vast majority belong to Slumdog.
As representative for the Utah critics, I can say that the absence of a runner-up in Supporting Actor was the result of a unanimous selection. Runners-up were included only where a non-winner received votes.
Yeah, that Best Supporting Actress lineup is awfully fun — everyone who hasn’t been on all the lists of late. Very happy to see DeWitt acknowledged. The anchor of that film. And Evan Rachel Wood — she was almost my NGNG the other day. I think she’s really going to bloom in the next few years. She’s in that transitioning phase from child to adult actor. She never shied away from the heavy stuff as a teen, so I’m looking forward to what she takes on later in her career. That Woody Allen role is always a good stone upon which to step.
And it really is a shame about Let The Right One In and Oscar. I know it’s been discussed ad nauseam, but can we please do something with that Foreign Language Film category. It just seems that a lot of great films aren’t getting their due. Weird to see these films rack up all of the precursors and be complete no-shows come Oscar. LTROI has been doing so well. It’s even been at my local theatre for weeks now with showings all day. It really is quite the little savage gem.
SERIOUSLY? No votes for any other supporting actor? That seems incredible to me! Go Heath!
Is anyone else thinking that Wall-E will score a director nod but no best picture nod, rather than the other way around? I believe Stanton truly deserves a best director nod.
Yes, I’m very glad Ledger is getting all the love he deserves. It’s very cool he won unanimously.
But it should be said that it also means no one voted for any of the other leading horses is the Supporting Actor category: Josh Brolin and James Franco in “Milk”, a biopic about a homo, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Doubt”, who plays a possibly pedophilic Catholic priest, who may or may not have molested a boy.
It’s Utah. Shocking!
And there you have it. Thanks Scott Renshaw. That’s actually kind of cool.
Rightfully so, since no other Supporting role comes close to Ledger’s.
To the gay fella up there, ‘Milk’ is not great because it’s about gay people. It’s a fine film in its own right. It’s textbook indie, skillfully hitting very archetypal notes. It’s actually not very challenging at all, in that there’s no ambiguity, and Milk is cheerfully sent up to heaven at the end in the best martyr tradition (not a spoiler, I should think). There are things I had problems with (the 2nd boyfriend was such an ass, I couldn’t work out what he was doing there), couple flat scenes here and there, but overall it’s a terrific, standard indie film. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, but it shouldn’t be because it talks about being gay nonstop. The film is not a gimmick, or an antic, or whatever you called it. Sean Penn, known for his brooding, is great. I couldn’t take my eyes off him or his toothy sweetness, and I completely forgot I was watching him. That’s the hallmark of a great, Oscar-worthy leading performance.
It did make me wonder about the Importance of Being Gay. I’m not, but I’ve a fair number of gay friends & acquaintances, and it seems not to be a big deal. I.e., someone can be gay, but it doesn’t define them; they’re also a publicist, a great cook, and a Dodgers fan, for example – and those aspects are just as interesting and just as important in defining who they are. But I live in a large city. I don’t know many (any?) gay men or women who live in culturally “backward” areas, and I can’t pretend to know any pain or baggage that lies beneath the surface. In that vein, I got a little tired of the film’s men’s “gayness” being not just their defining characteristic, but their ONLY characteristic. But then I thought it was a reflection of Harvey himself, who was always checking out, and declaiming on, the cute men in his immediate surroundings. Also, put simply, when you do something that offends someone, you dwell you on that thing more. These men were in the middle of a pitched battle centered around their choice of lifestyle (orientation not being the choice, but the decision to buck the trend & flaunt it). So, in fighting for the right for their lifestyle to be accepted, we saw them being consumed by it, and their other interests and bits of humanity left by the wayside. Of course I can’t speak for gay people, but I can imagine, at the very least, it was in part because of these men’s actions that such a lifestyle is, at least in some parts of the country, not a very “big deal” (your term) today.
It’s interesting how the last few critics’ awards have diverged so much from the earlier ones. Which leads me to this question which maybe someone involved in these sorts of things can answer: Are voters for the later awards ever swayed by the results of the earlier ones, in the sense that someone like Sally Hawkins starts to dominate, so the voters feel like they need to spread the love a bit more and give others some recognition?
Totally divulging but, I’m here to proclaim, Frost/Nixon is out. Think about it. How many people are putting it as a 1 or 2? It doesn’t make any sense. Someone explain to me how this sense of a lock came to be?
Right now it’s:
Slumdog
Button
Milk
Knight
Doubt*
*Easily could be replaced by Wall-E, The Wrestler, or Rev Road, or i guess Nixon.
Ryan Hoffman,
I completely agree with you about Frost/Nixon. Who the hell is putting it as 1st or 2nd. However, last year, I kept thinking the same thing about Michael Clayton. And we know what happened there!
I think that no runner means that everyone voted for Heath. It’s not a smack in the face of anyone.
You feel nothing for Milk. The film is devoid of emotion.
Good point about Clayton, who the hell was votin that in?
“You feel nothing for Milk. The film is devoid of emotion.”
I found the film utterly heart-breaking. And I broke down in tears when Prop 6 was defeated.
I’ll agree to disagree, red wine. I didn’t feel anything when he won the election. There was no character development at all. Nobody changes, scenes just happen. It was terribly edited and had lazy writing, with the whole I’ll explain stuff through a cassette. I just felt no emotional pay off, I was disconnected. Aside from Penn, I thought it was terribly acted. I really wanted to like this, and, quite honestly, I haven’t been this disappointed since American Gangster. It was just sloppy, lazy, and boring.
At least I’m not saying I just hate it for the hell of it. There’s a method to the madness.
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Re: “Milk.” Not that the Utah critics have to prove their bona fides, but they picked “Brokeback Mountain” as its best movie of the year in 2005.
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