By Steven Zeitchik

There's nothing a story-starved reporter — or copy-starved editor — loves more than a list. Like a male character in a Nick Hornby novel, like a housefrau compiling the week's grocery needs, scribes meticulously lay out their favorites and their not-so favorites, adding and subtracting, shuffling and shuffling again, until we're left with…group of titles next to a bunch of numbers.

And yet these lists make people extremely passionate, for reasons we only sometimes understand.

One question that does strike us as semi-interesting as everyone's puttered around for favorites the past few weeks is how much should these choices should overlap with commercial success.

On the one hand, you have the critics who put "Wall-E" and "Iron Man" on. On the other, you have those contrarians picking the most obscure movies possible. Props to the New York Post's V.A. Musseto for taking this year's trophy; he chose the Spanish-language "In the City of Sylvia" as his best movie of the year (don't worry, we had to look it up too).

There's no right answer on the correct balance of all this, but we're hearing from critics aplenty over a column we wrote Tuesday  about the value — and danger — of putting too many popular movies on a list.

 Our thesis: the occasional "Dark Knight" on the end-of-year list is good for film  criticism, too many blockbusters make you look preening. That's never good — and especially not good in a time of waning column inches for reviews.

 And with that bit of ambivalence about (certain) rankings, we offer — delightfully late and inexplicably odd-numbered — our list of the top eleven movies of the year. Send appraisals, complaints to Ben Brantley.

The Risky Eleven

1) The Wrestler
2) Slumdog Millionaire
3) Synecdoche, New York
4) The Class
5) Sugar
6) Man on Wire
7) Body of Lies
Two Lovers
9) The Dark Knight
10) Rachel Getting Married
11) Defiance

By Steven Zeitchik

The hand feeds, the teeth don't bite. A good rule, whether at the zoo or at an awards show.

And indeed, most of the actors, writers and directors honored at the New York Film Critics Circle fete Monday night had nothing but fond things to say about critics; they either complimented them to the skies or  honestly expressed how feelings toward them changed depending on…circumstances.

(Jenny Lumet on what it was like to grow up with a director father who read the reviews copiously. "You guys terrified me as a little girl since Day 1. You've been called every name in the book. The profanity…and then (sometimes) 'Geniuses. 'They're so perceptive.'")

Still, we couldn't help but notice a few eyebrow-raisers. Introducing Mike Leigh, Salman Rusdhie took out the chief literary critic at the London Times, called him "three feet tall and angry" and cited, admiringly, a moment when Leigh called the critic an a*#hole on a popular radio program.

But it was Josh Brolin who had the choicest words for a critic — New York Times scribe Ben Brantley — whom apparently he's not that fond of after the theater writer panned him a while back. "Honestly, I hate that motherf#@#%er," said Brolin, who has a tendency for the, er, off-the-cuff remark at  awards shows. "And I don't think he's a good writer."

That's just some of the juicy stuff. Here are some other nuggets from the always intimate but still ritzy event thrown by the Gotham scribes right after the holidays.

* Does Sigourney Weaver have clout with Oscar voters? Pixar should be very happy if she does. Weaver thinks "Wall-E" is, um, very good. "(It's) one of the best films of the year. One of the best films ever…the movie's detail, its charm, its humor, its hope. It's a classic."

* NYFCC chair and event emcee Lisa Scharzbaum of EW, on the real-life origins of a particular film: "I used to think the script for Rachel Getting Married came out of Jenny Lumet's head. Then I met the Lumet family."

* CEOs didn't fare so well either. Lumet — after getting into a back and forth from the audience with Pa Sidney, who was at the podium, over the real-life roots of  the "Married" dishwasher scene, took the stage and offered this haiku on Sony Classics' Michael Barker:
Texas eye candy.
Howard Stringer – But with taste.
Jewish? It could be.

* Did Robert Klein really say, when introducing the award for "Man On Wire," "I never liked (really tall) buildings. But 9/11 is going too far."

* Again Brolin, after chiding Sean Penn for the actor's self-seriousness (or was he chiding those who chided Penn for his self-seriousness? So hard to tell) had a whole riff, said in a deadpan voice. with theatrically long pauses.

"Quite an actor Sean Penn, quite an actor. [Pause] Amazing. [Pause] And now I'm an asshole. Like Russell Crowe.  Because I'm not as smart as Sean. [Pause] Quite an actor. [Pause] Amazing actor. I've loved you in Milk, I thought what you did with that role was incredible. We've known you as an actor who doesn't smile very much. And the fact that you smiled as much as you did in this film is amazing. Truly incredible. You are an amazing actor. You are going to get the Oscar. Because you smiled so much."

* Penn got in his own good-natured (we think) digs at Brolin. "I always wrote him off as a handsome square jawed actor…There's no one who's as big a nightmare as him." And then, "No one has much endurance at night and as a little during the day." (Then he said he's a great leading man, was one of the best experiences working with him, yadda yadda).

* Tony Kushner worked the bait and switch humor as he intro-ed "Milk" as best picture. "I want to thank the thousand of gay faceless, nameless people…who were hired to write a screenplay about the life of Harvey Milk over the past fifteen years."

He also thanked the "remarkable gay-straight alliance" that…got "Milk" made. "Gus Van Sant, Dustin Lance Black, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen. They're the gays. James Schamus and the actors — those are the straights. Give or take some of the actors."

The movies to see this week are Zodiac and Avenue Montaigne. Here are Metacritic’s numbers for Zodiac, and Avenue Montaigne. The movie is an utterly delightful escapist French piffle.

Here’s a NYDN followup on how much David Fincher demanded of his Zodiac actors. The results speak for themselves. UPDATE: Here’s Newsweek’s interview with Robert Graysmith.

Here’s Nicole Sperling’s assessment of the upcoming weekend boxoffice. Here are Fandango’s top five weekly advance ticket sales (as of 3/02/07 9:00 a.m. PST). I have to assume 300 will take off like a rocket when it opens next week.

Movie Fandango User Rating* % of Fandango’s Sales
Wild Hogs “Must Go” 34%
300 “Must Go” 21%
Zodiac “Go” 12%
Bridge to Terabithia “Go” 4%
Ghost Rider “Go” 3%

Fandango Weekly Poll (as of 3/02/07 9:00 a.m. PST): “If you plan to see 300, which of the following factors makes you want to see this movie?”
Action-adventure genre 33%
The Frank Miller novel, upon which the movie is based 26%
Other 15%
Seeing a movie on the IMAX screen 13%
Gerard Butler and the rest of the film’s cast 7%
Director Zach Snyder’s previous work (including the Dawn of the Dead remake) 6%

Critics hate it when they are ignored. Truth is, Babel got slammed by several highbrow critics, but the Academy paid them no heed and nominated the movie anyway. So here’s The New Yorker’s David Denby twisting himself into intellectual knots to justify his take on Babel. The piece is excellently argued; it’s a lovely survey of alternative narrative filmmaking. But I disagree with him on Babel. The movie builds emotion across its several storylines. And Arriaga wrote the movie with the cuts that are in it. It’s in the screenplay, not discovered in the editing room. I do want to see what Gonzalez Inarritu will do with different writers, because his sensibility is less misanthropic, I suspect, than Arriaga’s.

The always well-informed Edward Copeland wants to make sure that Oscar prognosticators don’t perpetuate Oscar factoids that are wrong, he says:

I hate when Oscar errors start being repeated as fact. This happens every year. Someone gets a fact wrong — and who knows where it starts? — then more people either too lazy to check on facts for themselves or too ignorant to know better keep repeating the same mistake time and time again.

This week, it concerns Little Miss Sunshine after it won ensemble acting at the SAG awards, which for some reason people found surprising because they continue to operate under the false assumption that an ensemble acting prize is the same thing as a best picture prize when it’s not and when a sizable chunk of SAG ensemble winners did not go on to win the Oscar for best picture and in one case (The Birdcage) wasn’t even in the running.

Excuse me, I digress. The error that is being perpetuated is that when Driving Miss Daisy won best picture in 1989 without its director Bruce Beresford being nominated for director, it was the ONLY time it ever happened in Oscar history. WRONG! It was the first time it had happened since 1931-32 when Grand Hotel won without its director being nominated (Hell, Grand Hotel did even better than that —best picture was its ONLY nomination.)

First, I caught this mistake in the always factually challenged David Poland’s column where he wrote:

Other stats working against the nominees include the fact that only one film has ever won Best Picture without a directing nod, Driving Miss Daisy. Does that mean the disqualification of Little Miss Sunshine? Oh yes… and it’s been 29 years since the last comedy, Annie Hall, won Best Picture.

Now today, I find in an article by Richard Corliss at Time.com:

And only once did the Best Picture Oscar go to a film whose director didn’t receive a nomination: in 1990 with Driving Miss Daisy and Bruce Beresford. So the odds against Little Miss Sunshine are 70 to 1. That a lot of Oscar history the indie movie has to buck.

To make matters even worse, Corliss also misspells Valerie Faris’ last name as Feris and gets this fact wrong as well:

Sunshine has a more daunting historical obstacle to hurdle: its directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Feris, were not nominated in their Oscar category. That citation would have been sweet, whatever you think of the movie, since the Academy has never nominated a directorial pair, and because you could count the number of women nominated for Best Directors on the fingers of a maimed hand. (Three: Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano and Sofia Coppola, the only American woman, for Lost in Translation.)

Not only has a directing pair been nominated before — Warren Beatty and Buck Henry for Heaven Can Wait in 1978. A directing pair actually won when Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins took the directing prize for West Side Story in 1961.

If I could have earned a nickel for every incorrect Oscar fact I’ve seen written over the years, I’d be a very rich man right now — and people in the media wonder why they keep losing credibility with the public when they can’t even get the simple shit right.

I wonder if Corliss—who can be pretty anal about getting his facts straight— posted his story online without getting the once-over from the usual phalanx of Time fact-checkers? It’s tempting to pick up facts from other bloggers, but not usually a wise idea. I’ve been burnt by that. Once.

The Broadcast critics gave two big prizes to The Departed Friday night, reports THR’s Borys Kit:

Warner Bros. Pictures’ “The Departed” won the best picture and the film’s Martin Scorsese won the best director award at the Broadcast Film Critics Assn.’s 12th Annual Critics Choice Awards, held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Friday night. Forest Whitaker won the best actor award for his performance in Fox Searchlight’s “The Last King of Scotland,” while Helen Mirren was crowned best actress for her work in Miramax’s “The Queen.”

Other big winners of the evening were Fox Searchlight’s “Little Miss Sunshine” and Dreamworks-Paramount’s “Dreamgirls,” which each won four prizes apiece.

Rotten Tomatoes has compiled its best-and-worst reviewed movies of 2006, and today announced its 8th Annual Golden Tomato Award winners. They include Casino Royal for the Wide Release / Action/Adventure category and The Queen for the Limited Release / Drama category. This year’s Moldy Tomato Award, for the worst-reviewed movie of the year, went to Basic Instinct 2. Here’s a full list of winners in all 14 categories:

2006 Golden Tomato Award Winners
Wide Release / Action/Adventure: “Casino Royale”
Limited Release / Drama: “The Queen”
Animation: “Cars”
Comedy: “Borat”
Documentary: “Wordplay”
Foreign: “Pan’s Labyrinth”
Horror: “The Descent”
Family: “Lassie”
Romance: “The Science of Sleep”
Sci-Fi: “Children of Men”
Thriller: “The Departed”
Moldy Tomato (Worse Reviewed Movie of the Year): “Basic Instinct 2”

The LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas polled quite a large group of critics—about 62 in fact, many of them with alternative or indie leanings. Again, the wonderful 60s French World War II movie Army of Shadows leads the list, followed closely by The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and United 93. This group, for example, went big for Three Times, L’Enfant, Inland Empire and Old Joy, which should tell you something.

# Artist/Title Points Mentions
1 Army of Shadows 263 33
2 The Death of Mr. Lazarescu 214 29
3 United 93 184 26
4 The Queen 176 29
5 Letters From Iwo Jima 174 25
6 The Departed 163 29
7 Three Times 132 21
8 L’Enfant 127 22
9 Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan 114 18
10 Inland Empire 111 16
11 Pan’s Labyrinth 110 23
12 Children of Men 104 20
13 L’Intrus 102 14
14 Old Joy 91 18
15 Flags of Our Fathers 81 13
16 A Scanner Darkly 78 13
17 A Prairie Home Companion 75 16
18 Climates 70 11
19 Volver 57 11
20 Casino Royale 52 12
20 Half Nelson 52

UPDATE: The Reeler reports on the latest New Times slash.