SF Critics’ Best Picture: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Here’s something I can get behind. The San Francisco Film Critics Circle has chosen long-shot dark horse The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as their best picture, and star Casey Affleck as Best Supporting, although I would’ve given it to Sam Rockwell. Jesse James is a great movie, if a bit long, and it deserves to be seen more than it has been. Perhaps the fact that it’s a quiet western with barely any gunplay means they couldn’t figure out how to market it. Apparently “Brad Pitt” isn’t enough.

Movie City News has the fill award list, which includes George Clooney and Julie Christie with the top acting awards, and another notch for Amy Ryan as Best Supporting Actress in Gone Baby Gone, which makes me wonder if anyone even saw Cate Blanchett’s Dylan.

Curiously, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly won for Best Foreign Film, but it wasn’t actually a foreign film - the screenplay was originally in English but was translated to French to be closer to the book and the truth of Jean-Dominique Bauby, whose tragedy the story relates. Best Foreign Language Film, maybe, but c’mon, SFCC.