Inside the New York Critics Circle

Just in case you think all these year-end movie awards are decided at genteel gatherings of mild-mannered academics, here's a link to Bilge Ebiri's hilarious inside scoop on yesterday's New York Critics Circle awards, over at Nerve's ScreenGrab blog. Worth reading if only to see how close "A Scanner Darkly" came to beating out "Happy Feet" for best animated film -- and missed only because Andrew Sarris had to go to the bathroom.

My own experience is that these annual meetings can often be delightfully cranky and eccentric. In fact, last weekend's Boston Society of Film Critics confab felt a little too sedate precisely because Gerry Peary wasn't there to scold us all for being dreadful sell-outs, as he does, with gusto, every year. And I'll never forget my first experience as a member of the National Society of Film Critics: I sat down for the annual meeting next to an August Legend and, after my telling him how much his writing had meant to me over the years, he pointed out another critic across the room and irascibly called him an extremely unprintable epithet. The other fellow's crime, apparently, was panning one of the August Legend's books -- ten years earlier. Say one thing for critics: We know how to hold a grudge.