LAFCA Announce Their 2010 Picks

Where, like I said when I made my predictions, I am not very good at picking the precursors - the Oscars, yes, but these, not so much.  Anyway, I only picked two and a half correctly (picking one of the director duo that tied is the half) but there were some good surprises (though Blue Valentine was not among those).  My choices for screenplay and cinematography for tomorrow's NY announcement won here, so perhaps I am just ahead of my time.

It is good to see Carlos get some love and it looks like Aussie actress Jacki Weaver is quickly becoming a frontrunner for the Oscar for Supporting Actress - she is the only acting frontrunner to pop up as of yet, though The Social Network and it's director and screenwriter are surely frontrunners.

Anyway, here are the LA picks.

Picture: The Social Network
[Runner up: Carlos]
Director: (tie) Olivier Assayas for Carlos and David Fincher for The Social Network
Actress: Kim Hye-Ja in Mother
[Runner up: Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone]
Actor: Colin Firth in The King's Speech
[Runner up: Edgar Ramirez in Carlos]
Supporting Actress: Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom
[Runner up: Olivia Williams in Ghost Writer]
Supporting Actor Neils Arestrup in A Prophet
[Runner up: Geoffrey Rush in The King's Speech]
Screenplay Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network
[Runner up: The King's Speech]
Cinematography Matthew Libatique for Black Swan
[Runner up: Roger Deakins for True Grit]
Music (tie) Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, The Social Network and Alexandre Desplat, The Ghost Writer
Production Design Guy Dyas for Inception
[runner up: The King's Speech]
Documentary Last Train Home
[Runner up: Exit Through the Gift Shop]
Experimental Jean Luc Godard's Film Socialisme 

Foreign Film Carlos (France)
[Runner up: Mother (South Korea)]
Animated Film Toy Story 3
[Runner up: The Illusionist]
New Generation Lena Dunham for Tiny Furniture
Legacy of Cinema Award Serge Bromberg, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, and the F.W. Murnau Foundation and Fernando Pena for the restoration of Metropolis 

Career Achievement Paul Mazursky

Here is a blurb from Nathanial Rogers great site, The Film Experience, which I wanted to add just to let everyone know of the stupidity in some of the Oscar eligibility rules:

ONE FINAL IMPORTANT NOTE: South Korea's Mother & France's A Prophet, which both won awards today with Los Angeles critics, represent flip sides of the same Oscar coin. Both were submitted for Oscar consideration last year in the foreign film category but were not released in Los Angeles theaters in 2009 rendering them ineligible for other Oscar nominations that year. They both received theatrical releases in 2010, and because of Oscar rules on that matter, only Mother is now eligible for Oscar consideration (in all categories EXCEPT foreign film since it had its shot last year). A Prophet, having been nominated in its only eligible category last year, is not eligible for any further consideration. Make sense?