A scene of protest in the film 'Milk'
Focus Features

Milk: It's coming on strong in early awards, but does that mean anything?

We're a bit more than ten weeks away from the presentation of the Oscars on February 22, 2009. There are no nominees yet, and some movies expected to have significant showings haven't even opened yet (The Wrestler, Gran Torino, and Revolutionary Road, to name just three). But we have now entered the hinting season, where you will begin to hear that certain other awards build momentum toward the Oscars. But is it true?

Understandably, the prognosticating about awards and nominations yet to come relies on awards and nominations already given. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association awarded Best Picture, somewhat surprisingly, to WALL-E, with The Dark Knight as runner-up. Then Wednesday, the New York Film Critics Circle followed, naming Milk Best Picture.

Not unlike in politics, sometimes what's most instructive is looking at the downticket races. Not only did the NYFCC give Best Picture to Milk, it also gave Best Actor to Sean Penn, as did the LAFCA, giving Penn two big victories in what's widely believed to be a two-man race between him and Mickey Rourke of The Wrestler.

More surprisingly, perhaps, the NYFCC gave Best Supporting Actor to Josh Brolin, also for Milk, passing over Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, who won over at the LAFCA. The New York critics also handed their Best Director prize to Happy-Go-Lucky director Mike Leigh, rather than Nolan or Van Sant, or Danny Boyle, who won with the L.A. critics for Slumdog Millionaire.

An examination of the size of the grain of salt with which early awards should be taken, after the jump...

 

But keep in mind that it's important not to make too much of all this. The NYFCC has voted with the Oscars for the last two Best Actors — Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Forest Whitaker in The Last King Of Scotland — but before that, the last time it tipped off the eventual Oscar-winning Best Actor was (get this) Geoffrey Rush for Shine in 1996. The Los Angeles critics have, in the same period, gotten two more right, but it's still no guarantee of anything. In fact, there are a couple of occasions (notably Bill Murray for Lost In Translation and Daniel Day-Lewis for Gangs Of New York) where New York and Los Angeles were in agreement and the Oscar went another way.

With Best Picture, it's even sillier. If you pretend they're guessing who will get the Oscar (which they aren't), the New York critics picked No Country For Old Men correctly last year, and The Lord Of The Rings in 2003, and before that, you have to go back to Schindler's List in 1993. The L.A. critics: ditto, except that they even missed The Lord Of The Rings. These awards may speak to who has buzz for nominations, certainly — something we already knew — but they are a rotten predictor of Academy Awards.

Conventional wisdom holds that the best predictor is the Golden Globes, which announce their nominations Thursday. The Globes are a little tough to evaluate fairly, because they hedge by picking one comedy/musical and one drama. That gives them twice the opportunity to snag the occasional comedy/musical that actually wins the Oscar for Best Picture — as was the case with Chicago.

Sure, they have a few more hits on their record — American Beauty and Gladiator were both Best Dramas, and they got Titanic and The English Patient and Forrest Gump, too — the big, crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking dramas, the Globes tend to get right.

But how this is going to work with a movie like Milk? Or like The Dark Knight, which isn't nearly as noble and sweeping as most of the ones the Globes have accurately called. Once those nominations are out, we'll talk a little bit about the surprises, and what they might mean for Oscar season.