Village VOICE 5th annual VOICE critics’ poll 2003
:: The Village VOICE has released its list of winners of the 5th annual VOICE critics’ poll. Here’s how it works:
- We asked each critic to cite 10 films, five lead performances, five supporting performances, five undistributed films (unranked), and one choice each in the other categories. As usual, participants were drawn mainly from North American alternative weeklies, online publications, and film journals (those few daily or mass-market critics invited were either Voice alumni or veterans of the New York Film Festival selection committee). Again, the scoring system is borrowed from the long-standing Pazz & Jop formula. Each film and performance in an unranked ballot received 10 points. Ranked ballots were weighted as follows: For film #1 (15 points), #2 (14), #3 (13), #4 (12), #5 (11), #6 (9), #7 (8), #8 (7), #9 (6), #10 (5). For performance #1 (14), #2 (12), #3 (10), #4 (8), #5 (6). (Ties were allowed, and computed accordingly. Some critics squeezed in more than 10 films; we list their ballots in full but assigned points only to the first 10.) * We asked our voters to focus on films that opened for a theatrical engagement in North America during the past 12 months. (Titles that have yet to open wide[r]—like films with brief Oscar-qualifying December runs—will have their 2003 points carried over to Take Five’s tally if they get more points next year than they did this year.) For performances that received votes in both lead and supporting, we shifted the points to the more popular category. We allowed splits in one-choice categories like director and screenplay.
Categories include Best Film, Performance, Supporting Performance, Director, Screenplay, First Film, Documentary, Cinematography and Undistributed.
Individual ballots of the participating critics can be viewed here. A collection of essays on the year’s films is also provided. The VOICE film critics, J Hoberman, Michael Atkinson, and Dennis Lim, listed their top films of the year as Spider, Platform/Unknown Pleasures, and Medea, none of which I have seen. Medea was made in 1988 for Danish television by Lars Von Trier. No wonder I missed it.
