WOMEN FILM CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS AND CEREMONY ON-AIR 2015

THE WOMEN FILM CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS CEREMONY 2015 BROADCAST

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The Women Film Critics Circle Awards 2015

The Women Film Critics Circle is an association of sixty-five women film critics and scholars from around the country and internationally, who are involved in print, radio, online and TV broadcast media. We came together in 2004 to form the first women critics organization in the United States, in the belief that women's perspectives and voices in film criticism need to be recognized fully.

WOMEN FILM CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2015

BEST MOVIE ABOUT WOMEN
Suffragette

BEST MOVIE BY A WOMAN
Suffragette

BEST WOMAN STORYTELLER [Screenwriting Award]
Carol: Phyllis Nagy

BEST ACTRESS
Carey Mulligan: Suffragette

BEST ACTOR
Eddie Redmayne: The Danish Girl

BEST YOUNG ACTRESS
Brie Larson: Room

BEST COMEDIC ACTRESS
Amy Schumer: Trainwreck

BEST FOREIGN FILM BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
The Second Mother

BEST FEMALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE
Suffragette

WORST FEMALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE
Jurassic World
       
BEST MALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE  
Bridge Of Spies

WORST MALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE   
Steve Jobs

BEST DOCUMENTARY BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
Amy

BEST SCREEN COUPLE
TIE:
45 Years: Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay
Room: Brie Larson and Jason Tremblay

BEST THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED MOVIE BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
Bessie

BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES
Mad Max: Fury Road

BEST ANIMATED FEMALE
Joy, Amy Poehler: Inside Out

BEST FAMILY FILM
Inside Out

WOMEN'S WORK/BEST ENSEMBLE
Suffragette

*SPECIAL MENTION AWARDS*

COURAGE IN FILMMAKING
Sarah Gavron: Suffragette

*ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: A film that most passionately opposes violence against women
He Named Me Malala
 
*JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: For best expressing the woman of color experience in America
What Happened, Miss Simone?

*KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity
Suffragette

ACTING AND ACTIVISM AWARD
Olivia Wilde: For her work with Save The Children, ACLU, and Artists For Peace. And her support for holistic organic causes needed for the sustenance of every community.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD:
Lily Tomlin

COURAGE IN ACTING: [Taking on unconventional roles that radically redefine the images of women on screen]
Brie Larson: Room

BEST FEMALE ACTION STAR
Charlize Theron, Mad Max: Fury Road

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN AWARD: [Performance by a woman whose exceptional impact on the film dramatically, socially or historically, has been ignored]
Alicia Vikander; The Danish Girl

MOMMIE DEAREST WORST SCREEN MOM OF THE YEAR AWARD:



Cate Blanchett: Cinderella

 
 











JUST KIDDING AWARDS [Individual Picks]

*Thrown Under The Bus Award: Girlhood. Goes to the talented cast and team of Girlhood for being made invisible (again) during awards season. Hmm, we wonder why??

Runners-Up:
Effie Gray
The Book Of Negroes
The Keeping Room


*Best Female Images: Fifty Shades Of Grey


*Best Equality Of The Sexes: Leonardo DiCaprio and that Female Bear on top.

*Bond Embracing Maturity Award: James Bond fully embracing mature actresses by casting Monica Bellucci as the oldest Bond Girl, by featuring her on screen for exactly seven minutes.
   
**ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Adrienne Shelly was a promising actress and filmmaker who was brutally strangled in her apartment in 2006 at the age of forty by a construction worker in the building, after she complained about noise. Her killer tried to cover up his crime by hanging her from a shower rack in her bathroom, to make it look like a suicide. He later confessed that he was having a “bad day.” Shelly, who left behind a baby daughter, had just completed her film Waitress, which she also starred in, and which was honored at Sundance after her death.

**JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: The daughter of a laundress and a musician, Baker overcame being born black, female and poor, and marriage at age fifteen, to become an internationally acclaimed legendary performer, starring in the films Princess Tam Tam, Moulin Rouge and Zou Zou. She also survived the race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois as a child, and later expatriated to France to escape US racism. After participating heroically in the underground French Resistance during WWII, Baker returned to the US where she was a crusader for racial equality. Her activism led to attacks against her by reporter Walter Winchell who denounced her as a communist, leading her to wage a battle against him. Baker was instrumental in ending segregation in many theaters and clubs, where she refused to perform unless integration was implemented.

**KAREN MORLEY AWARD: Karen Morley was a promising Hollywood star in the 1930s, in such films as Mata Hari and Our Daily Bread. She was driven out of Hollywood for her leftist political convictions by the Blacklist and for refusing to testify against other actors, while Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden were informants against her. And also for daring to have a child and become a mother, unacceptable for female stars in those days. Morley maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.

CONTACT: Criticalwomen@gmail.com

Suffragette Film Review: The Iron Ladies

While the mass movement for women's voting rights in the United States that reached its most heated moment back in the early 20th century is remembered mostly as a tame affair, apparently the more militant struggle back then in England is barely remembered at all. That is, until now when that one hundred year buried history has been boldly and brilliantly exhumed and brought back to life in the defiant and devastating historical drama, Suffragette.

And in stark contrast to the US where the organized movement was mostly a middle class affair, those fiery female rebels in England were thrust progressively through a combination of oppression and frustration into an explosive battle of the sexes. And fueled in no small part by outright class warfare. Provoked apparently by the rigid British class system, and by England divisively first granting voting rights solely to women of property. Which led to targeting in large part "the sacred ideology of property if we must."

CONTINUE TO READ THE ARTICLE HERE

Prairie Miller

Arts Express, Airing on the WBAI/Pacifica National Radio Network and Affiliate Stations. Thursdays 2pm ET on WBAI Radio in NY, and archived and streaming live everywhere at wbai.org.

Female Action Hero: Filmmaker Bree Newsome Redefines It

Arts Express: Kate Winslet's Chaos, The Female Museum Experience

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington: Huntington is recognized as one of America's finest animaliers, whose naturalistic works helped to bridge the gap between the traditional styles of the 1800s and the abstract styles of the mid-twentieth century. Her prominence also enabled other female artists to succeed.

**Art Corner: A listener guided tour of the National Academy Museum in New York City, and what visitors can discover there. Including images of seemingly spinning clocks, tunnels, the Ebola crisis, and the death of surfaces. Revealing other meanings and stories beneath the surface of things. Cynthia Parsons McDaniel reports.

**A Little Chaos: A conversation with actress Kate Winslet about her latest film channeling French feminism among 17th century royalty, as a determined equal opportunity gardener. While challenging as a character the 'dishonesty, synthetic world, pomp, posturing and ridiculous outfits' of that pretentious elite back then.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

**The Face Of An Angel: British director Michael Winterbottom phones in to Arts Express from Italy to talk about media madness today evoking Dante's dark wood in an existential wilderness, in his latest dramatic feature. Delving into nightmarish tabloid noir, and corporate media monsters as dark magical realism. Along with revisiting reflections on the legacy of his 2006 screen classic, The Road To Guantanamo.

**Poetry Corner: Appalachian movement poet Michael Henson reads from his work. Conjuring the ravages of capitalism and consumerism, Noah's Ark, subways, and the devastating rural oxycodone epidemic in progress - 'an amalgam of Whitmanic vision and intensity.' 

Arts Express, Thursdays 2pm ET: Airing on WBAI Radio in NY 99.5 FM, and streaming live and archived everywhere at wbai.org.

Cynthia Parsons McDaniel covers art and theater for Arts Express, and writes for Shortandsweetnyc.com. She is a member of The Women Film Critics Circle.

Arts Express: Mia Wasikowska Talks Madame Bovary, Corsets, Rabbit Holes And Mirrors

**Mia Wasikowska Talks Madame Bovary: A conversation with the actress phoning in from Australia, about her new film adapted from the Flaubert novel. And the art of vanishing magically into the screen personas of literary figures, including as well Jane Eyre and Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland, while inhabiting a very different past world. Or is it?

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

ALSO:

**Set Fire To The Stars: Elijah Wood and Celyn Jones, co-stars of this literary film noir touching on the last days of poet Dylan Thomas in America, in an intimate discussion with Arts Express. And what all this may have to do with the beat poets, punk rock, Elijah's journey from Frodo to hero worship, Auden, Blake, McCarthyism, and the radicalization of Thomas by the struggles of the Welsh miners. And, Dylan Thomas as angel, beast or madman - or all of them.

**The World Film Beat: Professor Dennis Broe reporting on location from Paris, delving into film trends, culturally and politically, currently surfacing in Europe. And connected to themes surrounding capitalist cruelty, the corporate parceling of Yugoslavia, and not so much war is hell, as war is for sale - both on and off screen.

Arts Express, Thursdays 2pm ET: Airing on WBAI Radio in NY 99.5 FM, and streaming live and archived everywhere at wbai.org.

Prairie Miller