In the aftermath of the awards season, I’ve been giving a good amount of thought to how awards should be approached here on Irreviews. Yearly movie awards are without a doubt a questionable thing. It is obviously quite artificial to give awards for a completely arbitrary time period like a calendar year. In a weak year, a “best picture” winner could wind up being a rather marginal film, where as in a strong year a truly good film might not win anything at all. What’s the value in that?
Furthermore, the more specific award categories used by critics circles, film festivals, and the Oscars and Golden Globes, are seriously confounded by overlap. Acting is as much direction and writing as it is performance. Directing is hard to differentiate from writing, cinematography, casting, and acting skill. And writing quality is so hard to pin down that awards given to films for their writing seldom make any sense at all. In the end, films truly deserving of awards tend to have more or less uniformly good execution in all areas, rendering such specific awards largely meaningless.
Therefore, I have decided to approach the awards problem through specifying various levels of artistic excellence so that their meaning is consistent year-over-year. These are defined via four classes of medals, and each class can have multiple recipients (or no recipients at all) in a given year.
Platinum Medals are reserved for timeless, near-perfect, films that deepen with every viewing. Films of this sort are extremely rare – the last one was The Lives of Others (2006.)
Gold Medals are awarded to “best in class” films of uniformly exceptional artistic quality with no major distracting flaws, and unlimited watchability.
Silver Medals are awarded to films exhibiting exceptional artistic quality in a number of significant areas, and which completely stand the test of repeated viewings, despite being flawed or unremarkable in other areas.
Bronze Medals are awarded for excellence upon first viewing that stays a vivid memory over time, usually justifying a re-watching or two, despite the fact that it lacks the qualities to earn a higher medal.
My yearly ratings are now built off this framework, with 6 non-medal ratings tiers beneath the award tiers. (For those who remember the prior “1 through 10” system, the new system is similar, but the tier definitions at the top are now better delineated and more meaningful.) During a given year, strong films will be designated on that year’s ratings page as “candidates” for a medal-class; as the year proceeds, they may move up or down depending on how their greatness wears in my memory, or how they fair upon re-watching. By (roughly) April of the following year, I will assign more-or-less final awards.
In addition, I will be awarding a Special Mention category, which will cover any other recognition-worthy aspects of films which failed to earn a medal. Special Mention will also include two specific awards: an award for Best Trailer and an “Indie Renaissance Award” for films upholding the unique aesthetic qualities of the 1990s Indie Renaissance.
The complete awards history will be kept on the navigation bar (far right.) The yearly ratings pages will remain on the navigation bar, but will be reformatted for easier reading, and will reflect the new categories.
So, without further ado, here are the 2012 Irreviews Movie Awards:
2012 Awards
Gold Medals
Silver Medals
Bronze Medals
Special Mention
- The Girl – Indie Renaissance Award
- Argo – For its remarkable opening sequence
- The Sound of My Voice – For its superb depiction of the fraudulent operational patterns of charismatic gurus, and for Brit Marling’s wonderful performance.
- Smashed – For Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s incredibly natural performance.
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Best Trailer Award
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