“Boyhood,” Richard Linklater’s era-spanning look at a Texas kid’s life from his first week of school to his first week of college, has won three top prizes at the 2014 awards of the Toronto Film Critics Association (TFCA).
Linklater also won for Best Director, and star Patricia Arquette has been named Best Supporting Actress for her role as the young protagonist’s mother.
The awards were voted on by the TFCA on December 14th – they also named their three finalists for the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award: “Enemy,” directed by Denis Villeneuve; “The F Word,” directed by Michael Dowse; and “Mommy,” directed by Xavier Dolan.
The 2014 Joe Fresh Allan King Documentary Award will be given to “The Overnighters,” and director Jesse Moss will receive a $5,000 cash prize. Albert Shin, director of the South Korean domestic drama “In Her Place,” was named the winner of the Scotiabank Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist. He will be presented with a $5,000 cheque at the TFCA’s awards gala on January 6th. At the gala, the TFCA will also announce the winner of the Manulife Student Film Award, which carries a $5,000 cash prize. It will be presented to a short film that the critics select from student entries submitted by film programs at Humber College, Ryerson University, Sheridan College, and York University.
As previously announced, the 2014 recipient of the Technicolor Clyde Gilmour Award is Piers Handling, who will present a filmmaker of his choice with $50,000 worth of services from Technicolor.
The 2014 TFCA Awards will be presented at a gala dinner at Toronto’s The Carlu on Tuesday, January 6th, hosted by Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director of the Toronto International Film Festival. There the TFCA will also reveal the winner of the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, which carries a record-setting $100,000 cash prize, the richest film award in the country. The runners-up will each receive $5,000.
“In an exceptional year for Canadian cinema, we’ve chosen three boldly directed films that are so dissimilar it’s almost hard to believe they’re set in the same country,” said TFCA President Brian D. Johnson on their official website. “’Enemy’s’ austere psychodrama portrays Toronto as a smog-lined tomb of condos and concrete, while ‘The F Word’ makes the city a bright, airy playground for an agile romantic comedy. And in ‘Mommy’ a drama of mental illness and parental anguish rips through a household in working-class Montreal.”
The full details of the 18th annual TFCA awards are as follows:
– Best Film: Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”
– Best Director: Richard Linklater for “Boyhood”
– Best Actor: Tom Hardy, for playing a Welsh builder in crisis in “Locke”
– Best Actress: Marion Cotillard, for her performance as a Polish woman navigating 1920s America in “The Immigrant”
– Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons, for his role as a tyrannical conductor in “Whiplash”
– Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, for her role as the mother of Mason Jr. in “Boyhood”
– Best Screenplay: “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
