Critics' awards are for the critics, not the films

Time movie critic Richard Corliss just posted an insightful examination of the motivation behind the critics' awards in LA and NY and beyond. Despite the headline, "Do Film Critics Know Anything?," it's not another marginalization of arts critics. "By the time I'd got back to my office, I had realized that we critics may give these awards to the winners, but we give them for ourselves," he writes. "In fact, we're essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us."