My Award winners for 2013!

Terrific year for film. Some of the movies that only won a single category are so good they could have swept in a weaker year. Anyway, click below to find out who took homes my prestigious honours!

My Award nominees for 2013 year in film

Here there are, all in one place for your perusal. Leading the way with nine nominations apiece are 12 Years a Slave and Gravity. At a distant second is Before Midnight with six, followed by Short Term 12, Her, and Inside Llewyn Davis each with five. Winners go up tomorrow.

Best Picture

12 Years a Slave -- S. McQueen, B. Pitt, D. Gardner, B. Pohlad, A. Katagas, J. Kleiner, A. Milchan

Before Midnight -- R. Linklater, Christos V. Konstantakopoulos, Sara Woodhatch

Gravity -- Alfonso Cuaron, David Heyman

Short Term 12 -- Maren Olson, Ron Najer, Joshua Astrachan, Asher Goldstein

Stories We Tell -- Anita Lee

My Award nominations: Picture

*(In hopes of catching one or two more foreign films imminently, I am holding off on that category for just a few more days, but I won't wait any longer to declare my fav five of the year.)

And so we finally reach the big daddy of them all. I've already waxed philosophical at length on how 'connected' I felt to the best films of the year, but the time has come to be a little less general and a little more specific. Without further ado, I present my five candidates for Best Picture of 2013 (plus my five runner-ups, so for all intents and purposes consider this my Top Ten article):

Connecting with the Movies of 2013

How does one begin to relate the white-knuckle space adventure of a thrill ride like Gravity to the soberly grounded realism of a docudrama like Captain Phillips? How is the intimate conversation piece Before Midnight at all similar to the sprawling historical tragedy 12 Years a Slave? What do any of these films have in common with each other – or any of the dozens of other applicable films released in the past 12 months – besides the fact that they are among the finest motion pictures of 2013? It's a question I find myself asking not only this year (which is being touted as one of the best for American cinema in a critic's age), but every year, as my mind mulls over the thematic patterns that connect the cream of the annual movie crop.

In 2009, 'escapism' was the pervasive theme connecting such disparate stories as Up in the Air, Avatar, The Hurt Locker, An Education, and Precious, among others; In 2011, 'nostalgia' and 'inspiration' connected many of the year's most celebrated titles, including The Artist, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, and many more; And for me, 2013's greatest films were connected by... well, 'connection'. Indeed, and as generic as it sounds, it's hard for me to recall a year in which so many memorable screen characters seem to triumph or fail as direct result of the connections they forge (or don't forge) between themselves and their fellow human beings.

My Award nominations: Acting Ensemble

Oh boy, where to begin. So many of this year's best movies owe much to the work done by their casts; transcending the sum of all the individual performances to become something more holistically powerful than any one actor could ever be (Even though those individual performances were indeed great). Check out the five best Acting Ensembles of the year, as far as I'm concerned, after the cut.

My Award nominations: Actress

Let's hear it for the ladies! This year boasted a wealth of outstanding performances, and even though the race for the Oscar is foregone, in any other year we could have had a real tight race due to the glut of quality acting. Behold the five Actresses I feel are the best of the best this year:

My Award nominations: Supporting Actress

Like it was with the men, work from Supporting Actresses this year was not quite as conspicuously strong as the leading roles, but there were a couple of real standouts in my opinion (and others' opinions too, going by the way awards bodies have been falling in line). Here are my top five:

Review - Short Term 12

(This one's up kinda late... sorry!)

“Look into my eyes, tell what it's like,

To live a life not knowing what a normal life's like.”

A sullen African-American teen, Marcus (Keith Stanfield), sits in a small bedroom rapping a cappella to an audience of his youth worker and his goldfish. When we look into his eyes, we can absolutely see that he never has, but has always longed to, know what a “normal” life's like. But for Marcus and the other underprivileged kids living at Short Term 12, the temporary foster care facility that gives this extraordinary little film its title, a normal life seems beyond their reach.

Written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, Short Term 12 centres around Grace (Brie Larson), a young woman who works at the home for at-risk youths with her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.). As Grace explains to a rookie staffer, their job is not to play therapist or parent, but simply to “create a safe environment”.

My Award nominations: Adapted Screenplay

I hate to be a downer (the whole reason I blog at all is to celebrate the movies), but I gotta admit: weak year for Adapted Screenplays. I struggled to find five that I felt merited awards consideration. And in a normal year, my "Just missed" titles wouldn't even be third tier contenders.

But it is what it is, and the five that I did decide on are still fine works. Read about them after the cut.