And The Winners Are…

December 15, 2014

The Toronto Film Critics Association names Richard Linklater’s Boyhood the Best Film of the Year

 

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Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s era-spanning look at a Texas kid’s life from his first week of school to his first week of college, has won three top prizes at the 2014 awards of the Toronto Film Critics Association.

In addition to the film’s Best Picture award, Linklater has won Best Director, and Patricia Arquette has been named Best Supporting Actress for her role as the young protagonist’s mother.

Richard Linklater.
Richard Linklater.

The awards were voted by the TFCA at a meeting on the afternoon of December 14. The membership also named its three finalists for the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award: Enemy, directed by Denis Villeneuve; The F Word, directed by Michael Dowse; and Mommy, directed by Xavier Dolan.

The 2014 Joe Fresh Allan King Documentary Award is given to The Overnighters; director Jesse Moss will receive a $5,000 cash prize. Albert Shin, director of the South Korean domestic drama In Her Place, was named the winner of the Scotiabank Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist. He will be presented with a $5,000 cheque at the TFCA’s awards gala on January 6th.

At the gala, the TFCA will also announce the winner of the Manulife Student Film Award, which carries a $5,000 cash prize. It will be presented to a short film that the critics select from student entries submitted by film programs at Humber College, Ryerson University, Sheridan College and York University.

As previously announced, the 2014 recipient of the Technicolor Clyde Gilmour Award is Piers Handling, who will present a filmmaker of his choice with $50,000 worth of services from Technicolor at the January 6 gala.

The 2014 TFCA Awards will be presented at a gala dinner at Toronto’s The Carlu on Tuesday, January 6, 2015, hosted by Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director of the Toronto International Film Festival. There the TFCA will also reveal the winner of the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, which carries a record-setting $100,000 cash prize, the richest film award in the country. The runners-up will each receive $5,000.

“In an exceptional year for Canadian cinema, we’ve chosen three boldly directed films that are so dissimilar it’s almost hard to believe they’re set in the same country,” said TFCA President Brian D. Johnson. “Enemy’s austere psychodrama portrays Toronto as a smog-lined tomb of condos and concrete, while The F Word makes the city a bright, airy playground for an agile romantic comedy. And in Mommy a drama of mental illness and parental anguish rips through a household in working-class Montreal.”

The full details of the 18th annual TFCA awards are as follows:

•    Best Film: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a cinematic masterpiece that evokes beauty in life and the inevitable passage of time

Runners-up: The Grand Budapest HotelInherent Vice

•    Best Director: Richard Linklater, for the singular achievement that is Boyhood

Runners-up: Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice; Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel

•    Best Actor: Tom Hardy, for playing a Welsh builder in crisis in Locke

Runners-up: Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler; Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel

•    Best Actress: Marion Cotillard, for her performance as a Polish woman navigating 1920s America in The Immigrant

Runners-up: Julianne Moore, Still Alice; Reese Witherspoon, Wild

•    Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons, for his role as a tyrannical conductor in Whiplash

Runners-up: Josh Brolin, Inherent Vice; Edward Norton, Birdman

•    Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, for her role as the mother of Mason Jr. in Boyhood

Runners-up: Katherine Waterston, Inherent Vice; Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer

•    Best Screenplay: The Grand Budapest Hotel, for its nuanced humour and intricate narrative dollhouse

Runners-up: Boyhood (dir. Richard Linklater); Inherent Vice (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

•    Best Animated Feature: Isao Takahata’s delicate fable The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Runners-up: The Lego MovieBig Hero 6How to Train Your Dragon 2

•   Best First Feature: Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox

Runners-up: Nightcrawler (dir. Dan Gilroy); John Wick (dir. David Leitch and Chad Stahelski)

•   Best Foreign-Language Film: Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure

Runners-up: Ida (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski); Leviathan (dir. Andrei Zvyagintsev)

•   Best Documentary Film: Jesse Moss’s The Overnighters

Runners-up: Citizenfour (dir. Laura Poitras); Manakamana (dir. Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez)

(Under the TFCA’s guidelines, contenders eligible for the awards include films released in Canada in 2014 plus films that qualify for the 2014 Oscars and have Canadian distribution scheduled by the end of February 2015.)