Showbiz

Pick your winners for cinema's glittering awards

Updated 16:02pm on 1 Aug 2008

The time is right for a new set of film awards, and it's not surprising that this newspaper is supporting it, as readers of the Daily Mail have helped to make 2008 a golden year for movies at the British box office. With Indiana Jones, Batman and WALL-E already on the rampage, and James Bond, Hellboy and Harry Potter still to come, this year looks like being the most successful for the cinema since the coming of television.

The past decade has seen a massive 50 per cent increase in UK box office takings, and the total size of the film audience in the UK last year rose to 4.3 billion. One in four of us Britons go to the cinema once every month.

Is Po the Panda your choice for a winner?

British films have been especially successful, and not only in the UK. The top 20 home-made films grossed £244 million at the British box office - an increase of more than 60 per cent on 2006.

UK movies also accounted for almost a third of all cinema tickets sold in Britain.

That's up from one in five the previous year.

Even more impressively, last year 700million people worldwide bought tickets to see British films - twice as many as in 2006.

And while we're crowing about British achievement, it's also worth noting the huge number of awards won by our actors and directors. And, out of the top 200 films at the worldwide box office this century, 30 were based on stories and characters created by British writers. These films have earned more than $14billion.

Christian Bale, in The Dark Knight, and Meryl Streep, in Mamma Mia! are both nominated for awards

So the Daily Mail is delighted to be the newspaper behind the National Movie Awards, which began last year with a star-studded ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, televised by ITV and attended by international big names such as Jamie Foxx, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman.

The big winner turned out to be the highest-grossing film of 2007, Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, which has earned more than £49m in the UK alone.

It picked up three awards - Best Family movie, and best male and female performance for Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson.

Amy Adams and Angelina Jolie are both nominated for best performace

Casino Royale won Best Action-adventure, while Hot Fuzz beat Borat to Best Comedy, and The Simpsons Movie triumphed as Best Animation.

The idea behind the National Movie Awards is to reward the kind of films and performances that go down best with the British public, but don't get much of a look-in at awards judged by industry professionals and critics.

I remember scanning last year's Oscar nominations for my favourite family film, Enchanted, a big hit for Disney just before Christmas, and being surprised to find no mention of it outside the Best Song category, or of its enchanting leading actress, Amy Adams. I'm pleased to note that both are strong contenders at the National Movie Awards.

There are more categories and nominees than last year. There's an especially strong field in the resurgent area of musicals, with Enchanted being joined by Tim Burton's classy Sweeney Todd and the Abba musical Mamma Mia!, which looks like becoming one of this summer's biggest hits.

Heath Ledger is nominated for a posthumous award for his role as The Joker

Musical stars are also well represented in the acting categories, with Johnny Depp (Sweeney) up against Patrick Dempsey (Enchanted) and Pierce Brosnan (Mamma Mia!), and Amy Adams (Enchanted) battling in the female performance category against Helena Bonham Carter (Sweeney) and Meryl Streep (Mamma Mia!).

It's one of the peculiarities of movie awards that action-adventures, long the most popular kind of film with moviegoers, have been almost ignored. The exception which proves the rule was The Lord Of The Rings - and even that had to wait a long time for Oscar recognition.

I reckoned the first two episodes of the trilogy were the best movies of their years, too.

This year's blockbusters have been the strongest ever, and a huge improvement in quality over last year's threequels.

It's an exceptionally strong line-up, with the mega-hit of the moment, The Dark Knight, up against some formidable challengers in Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor, I Am Legend and Wanted, all of which have won acting nominations for their hard-working stars.

Sex and the City and Kung Fu Panda are both up for awards

Presumably in order to recognise the outstanding achievements at this year's box office of action movies that have sprung from comic strips, there's a new 'Superhero' category, in which The Dark Knight slugs it out with Iron Man, Hancock and The Incredible Hulk. Though many of the nominees are international - really a euphemism for American - the awards retain their British character.

One interesting aspect of the past 12 months has been how much better two films with a strongly British flavour did in the UK, than in America.

The Golden Compass took more than £26min the UK - which made it the second-highest grossing picture over here, behind Harry Potter - and that's reflected in two Best Female Performance nominations for Nicole Kidman and Dakota Blue Richards, and the movie's nomination for Best Family film. It will be interesting to see if the audiences that flocked to see Golden Compass will vote for it over the more critically acclaimed WALL-E, which looks certain to win next year's Animation Oscar, and two recent audience-pleasers in Kung Fu Panda and The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

The other big hit over the past year with British audiences, if not critics, was St Trinian's, which took £12m at the UK box office. That success is reflected in acting nominations for Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Gemma Arterton, and the film itself is up for Best Comedy.

There it faces stern opposition from three American films: Juno, Sex And The City and (bewilderingly) The Love Guru. I'd have had Knocked Up, In Bruges, and Blades Of Glory on my list of nominees.

As a critic, I'm surprised that the nominees include Christian Bale for The Dark Knight, but can't find room for Heath Ledger, who turns the Joker into much more than a supporting character.

And some movies, which I considered modern classics - notably There Will Be Blood - didn't do well enough at the box office to warrant being in the running, so Mike Myers has been nominated for Best Male Performance, while Daniel Day Lewis has not. But there you are - this is an audience award, not a critics' one, and therefore favours the popular over the critically acclaimed.

The truth is that critics have the privilege of expressing their opinions, right or wrong, week after week, and we have our own annual award ceremonies, where we can hob-nob with the stars we've praised or insulted. Now it's your turn.