Toronto Film Critics Association announces its 2012 awards

The TFCA honours Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master with four awards

BESTIAIRE, GOON and STORIES WE TELL compete for Rogers $100,000 Best Canadian Film Award

TORONTO — The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 70mm drama about a battle of wills between a ravaged war veteran and the cult leader who offers him a place at his right hand, dominated the 2012 awards of the Toronto Film Critics Association.

Anderson’s film took Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, with co-star Philip Seymour Hoffman named the year’s Best Supporting Actor. Anderson has now won Best Picture twice (previous was Magnolia 1999) and Best Director three times (previous was Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love 2002). He also shared the Best Screenplay prize with Being John Malkovich author Charlie Kaufman (1999).

The awards were voted by the TFCA at a Dec. 16 meeting. The membership also chose the three finalists for the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award: Bestiaire, directed by Denis Côté; Goon, directed by Michael Dowse, and Stories We Tell, directed by Sarah Polley.

The 2012 TFCA Awards will be presented at a gala dinner at Toronto’s Carlu on January 8, 2013, hosted by Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director of the Toronto International Film Festival. There the TFCA will also reveal the winner of the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, which this year carries a record-setting $100,000 cash prize, now the richest arts award in the country. The runners-up will each receive $5,000. Don McKellar will present the award.

“The diversity of our three finalists for this extraordinary new prize show there’s nothing predictable about Canadian cinema,” said TFCA President Brian D. Johnson, film critic for Maclean’s. “These are all genres we haven’t seen before. Bestiaire is a visionary documentary from Montreal that explores our relationship to the animal world. Stories We Tell, a doc from Toronto, unfolds as a procedural home movie, investigating the filmmaker’s family secrets; and Goon, shot largely in Winnipeg and set across the country, is a viciously funny comedy about hockey violence.”

Canadian filmmakers were also honoured in the TFCA’s other awards, with Stories We Tell winning the Allan King Documentary Award and Panos Cosmatos sharing the Best First Feature prize for Beyond the Black Rainbow with Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild.

And the TFCA named Michael Haneke’s Amour the year’s Best Foreign-Language Film. Haneke’s drama, starring Jean-Louis Trintingnant and Emmanuelle Riva as an elderly couple deteriorating in their Paris apartment, won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

More details of the 16^th annual TFCA awards, which were announced today:

• Denis Lavant was named Best Actor for his complex performance as an actor assuming multiple roles for an unknown audience in Holy Motors.

• Rachel Weisz took Best Actress for her wrenching turn as a woman who follows her heart into an affair with a troubled veteran in Terence Davies’ 1950’s melodrama The Deep Blue Sea

• Gina Gershon was named Best Supporting Actress for her ferocious performance in William Friedkin’s Southern-fried noir comedy Killer Joe.

• ParaNorman, Chris Butler and Sam Fell’s stop-motion horror comedy about a young boy trying to stop an uprising of ghouls in his accursed New England town, won Best Animated Feature.

(Under the TFCA’s guidelines, contenders eligible for the awards include films released in Canada in 2012 plus films that qualify for the 2012 Oscars and have Canadian distribution scheduled by the end of February 2013.)

At the Jan. 8 gala, the TFCA will also present the Manulife Financial Student Film Award, which carries a $5,000 cash prize. It will be presented to a short film that the critics select from student entries submitted by film programs at Humber College, Ryerson University, Sheridan College and York University.

At the gala, the TFCA will also announce the Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist, sponsored by Deluxe, which will present a cheque for $5,000 and provide an equivalent value in post-production services.

The TFCA is extremely grateful to founding sponsor, Rogers Communications Inc, and to its other sponsors: Manulife Financial, Cineplex Media, Deluxe, Shangri-la Hotel, Maclean’s magazine, the Globe and Mail, Moet & Chandon, Ontario Media Development Corporation, Cineplex Entertainment, North 44, MacLaren McGill and the Carlu.

The TFCA Awards gala will take place in the art-deco Round Room of the historic Carlu, with cuisine provided by chef Mark McEwan, whose career has ranged from the stellar kitchen of North 44 to his current role as head judge on TV’s Top Chef Canada.

The Toronto Film Critics Association was established in 1997 and is comprised of Toronto based journalists and broadcasters who specialize in film criticism and commentary. All major dailies, weeklies and a variety of other print, electronic and web outlets are represented. Members of the TFCA also participate in the Federation of International Film Critics (FIPRESCI). As such, they have sat on juries at festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, Montreal, Miami, Palm Springs, Chicago, Pusan, Moscow, Amsterdam, London and Vienna, among others.