NSFC Gives Isabelle Huppert the Critical Triple

The National Society of Film Critics have spoken. The last important critics prizes of each season is sometimes idiocyncratic but not this year. They've gone with the the leaders in every single category (in terms of past critics prizes from all over the nation) except Best Cinematography. That award has varied from groups to groups and here it goes to Moonlight.

Most importantly they've given Isabelle Huppert the rare triple crown of film critic prizes. She'd previously won both New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. To show you how infrequently that happens a list of the previous winners of all three after the jump...

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'Winners!' Sincerely, Isabelle & Paul

Congratulations to the winners of our Elle poster contest. The posters are signed by Isabelle Huppert and Paul Verhoeven and I asked people to share a story about an early encounter with either a Huppert or Verhoeven film, though winners were drawn randomly.

Congratulates to... Joshua from Texas who writes:

It was Slant's review of that gave me, for the first time, the experience of approaching a film with a legitimate lens. It blew my mind and inspired me to become a Verhoeven devotee (I ordered a box set of all his Dutch films at a quite exorbitant price because I needed to see everything!) as well as laying the foundation for my academic interests; I study celebrity from a rhetorical perspective and wrote my first significant academic paper over Showgirls!

And Salim from Florida who writes:

My favorite Paul Verhoeven film encounter involved getting ready to go to Vegas in 2012 with my then-girlfriend to visit her family and deciding to prep her between Showgirls and Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven as a double feature at my place. Her genuinely positive response and the good we had watching the former told me she might be the one.

The posters are on their way to you!

Thanks to everyone who entered and if you didn't enter but are rooting for Huppert's Oscar nomination, cross your fingers and wish on the Oscar-nominated French stars who preceded her. 

Isabelle Huppert, French Legends, and Oscar Stats

by Nathaniel R

Are you biting your nails yet? No prediction for this year's Best Actress shortlist can come without some degree of "I could be getting this very wrong!" nerves. We've been Oscar watching for a long time and it's genuinely never looked this open this late in the game (with the possible exception of 2003 but for nearly the opposite reason). If Best Actress is not a five-way lock up by now (and it often is) it's usually at least settled but for a minor battle between two women for the "just happy to be nominated" fifth spot. This year is different. Seven women remain strong and precursor supported and virtually any combination of five names seems possible as long as you include both Emma Stone (with the reliable boost of leading a Best Picture frontrunner) and Natalie Portman (with the reliable boost of Oscar's deep-deep love for mimicry).

We always believed that Isabelle Huppert was a genuine threat for a Best Actress nomination this season for her phenomenal star turn in Elle. It wasn't so much that Elle, in which she plays a video game enterpeneur who becomes obsessed with her rapist, was a a fresh look at an old star (against type) or right in Oscar's wheel house (a dark comedy about rape. LOL, no). The appeal instead is that in Elle is a suffusion of everything that's special about Huppert: her superior intellect, fascinating opacity, tortured psychology, and her daring sexuality. Oscar would be wise to pounce in a year where the media has been this celebratory about her unique place in the cinematic landscape. 'It's time!' feelings don't generally come around all that often for true iconoclasts or women of a certain age. She's both so they must act now.

Binoche, Cotillard, Adjani, Deneuve

Here's another far more superficial but still excellent reason why Isabelle Huppert needs to be nominated...

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Cheer up, Isabelle

(She's still processing the horrid news).