Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards nominations announced

Among the nominees announced for the 2008 Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards, French-language films made a strong showing, and actors from both Hollywood and Bollywood were nominated in Canadian film categories.

The Quebec film C’est pas moi, je le jure! led the Canadian nominees for the 2008 Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards with four nominations for best Canadian film, best actor (Antoine L’í‰cuyer), best supporting actress (Suzanne Clément), and best director (Philippe Falardeau). The domestic drama, about a troubled ten-year-old boy in the late ’60s whose mother leaves her family for Greece, screened at the 2008 Vancouver International Film Festival.

C’est pas moi,  je le jure!  shared similar subject matter with Maman est chez le coiffeur (which also played at VIFF ’08), a gently heartbreaking study of the breakdown of a Quebecois family in the ’60s, whose mother abandons her children when she discovers her husband is having an affair with a man. Marianne Fortier, who played the mother, was nominated for a best actress award.

Bollywood’s Preity Zinta, in her role as an abused wife trapped in an arranged marriage in Heaven on Earth, is up against Hollywood’s Julianne Moore, as the sole person left with sight when a pandemic destroys everyone else’s vision in Blindness (a Canadian coproduction with Brazil and Japan).

Gael Garcia Bernal and Mark Ruffalo were also nominated for their work in Blindness, along with Real Time’s Randy Quaid, in the best supporting actor category.

Heaven on Earth director Deepa Mehta was nominated for best director, alongside the aforementioned Falardeau and Atom Egoyan (Adoration).

Heaven on Earth also received its third nomination in the best Canadian film category, in competition against C’est pas moi, je le jure! and the Quebec Inuit drama The Necessities of Life.

The Necessities of Life’s Natar Ungalaaq (who also starred in Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) is up for a best actor award, in addition to L’í‰cuyer and Jim Sturgess (Fifty Dead Men Walking).

Kari Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking, an adaptation of Martin McGartland’s autobiography which  focuses on the Irish civil conflict in the ’80s, is nominated for best British Columbia film, as well as Edison and Leo (the first Canadian stop-motion animation feature film) and Stone of Destiny (about an attempt by Scottish students to recapture the Stone of Scone, aka the Stone of Destiny or the Coronation Stone, from Westminster Abbey).

Meanwhile, the American biopic Milk led Hollywood nominees, with four nominations.

Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, and WALL-E are all up for best film. The directors of the first two films (Gus Van Sant, Danny Boyle) will compete against The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s David Fincher for best director.

Sean Penn (Milk), Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), and Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) are all nominated for best actor while Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky), Meryl Streep (Doubt), and Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road; The Reader) are up for best actress.

Best foreign language film will be a competition between the German-Turkish drama The Edge of Heaven, the Swedish vampire romance-drama Let the Right One In, and the French thriller Tell No One (which made some of the Straight's top 10 movies lists).

The awards will be announced on January 12 at the Railway Club.

The ceremony will also include a special presentation of the Achievement Award for Contribution to the British Columbia Film Industry, which will go to the late William Vince.

Vince, co-founder of Vancouver’s Infinity Features Entertainment and film producer (who was nominated for an Oscar for Capote), died of cancer in June 2008 at age 44.