The San Francisco Film Critics Circle has announced its 2011 awards for achievement in film, naming The Tree of Life the year's best picture and doling out top honors to the movie's director, Terrence Malick, and cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki.
Gary Oldman earned the group's Best Actor prize for playing a mild-mannered but quietly relentless intelligence expert in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which opens Fridayat the San Francisco Centre 9 andthe Sundance Kabuki Cinemas. Former Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, who stars in the upcoming We Need to Talk About Kevinas the devastated mother of an inherently evil teen, was named Best Actress.
The full list of awards reads as follows:
Best Picture:The Tree of Life
Best Actor: Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Best Actress: Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Best Director: Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks, Drive
Best Supporting Actress: Vanessa Redgrave, Coriolanus
Best Foreign Language Film:Certified Copy
Best Documentary:Tabloid
Best Animated Film:Rango
Best Original Screenplay: J.C. Chandor, Margin Call
Best Adapted Screenplay: Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree of Life
Special Citation: The Mill and the Cross
The San Francisco-based National Film Preservation Foundation received the group's Marlon Riggs Award, which honors courage and innovation in the world of cinema, for its efforts to save endangered, culturally significant films. Movies preserved by the foundation include Fighting Blood (1911), D.W. Griffith's silent Western about a military family at odds with Native Americans, and Let There Be Light (1946), John Huston's documentary examining the treatment of psychologically scarred World War II veterans.
