Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Ray Pride

A Sideways Step
By Leonard Klady

Sideways, the idiosyncratic road movie laced with fine wine and infidelity, received five awards including best picture and director from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Saturday. In uncharacteristic fashion the group also cited the film for its screenplay in what amounted to a rare sweep of the top artistic honors.

The LAFCA roster of winners that also included prizes to actors Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake and Liam Neeson in Kinsey and kudos to The House of Flying Daggers, The Incredibles and Born into Brothels, comes on the heels of the National Board of Review's list that was topped by Finding Neverland. In the coming days, the Boston and New York critics will also dole out awards and the Broadcast Film Critics and Hollywood Foreign Press will announce slates of nominees.

The abbreviation of the season of cheer prompted by the advance of the Oscar telecast has, if nothing else, created a cluster bomb of possibilities for studios and independents to promote films of ambition. What continues to be consistent is the use of the aforementioned organizations and the imminent publication of top 10 lists by the nation's reviewers as tools for what the industry maintains as its plum prize - The Academy Award.

In recent years, the plethora of award giving bodies have served to widen the discussion rather than build consensus, and there's scant indication this will change for 2004. The NBR, Los Angeles and New York groups rarely agree on a best picture and tend to have limited overlap in the honors they bestow for individual technical and artistic achievement. About Schmidt - Sideways director Alexander Payne's prior film - was also given top honors by the Los Angeles critics but wound up receiving nominations only for performances by Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates from the Academy.

With so many prize giving groups now extant, the mounting concern for films big and small is being shut out completely or winding up solely with technical honors. Most of the smaller films are laying out strategies predicated on mention in significant commercial categories that include acting, direction and best picture. It's often their only line of defense in a marketplace dominated by popular films through the second week of January. This year it will be particularly significant for such late year releases as The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, Hotel Rwanda, The Sea Inside, A Love Song for Bobby Long and The Woodsman.

The best that can be said about so many panels announcing their list of kudos in less than a week is that it reduces the element of suspense that could linger on for more than a month. However, it provides for little opportunity to re-engineer publicity and marketing strategies geared toward awards.