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LOS ANGELES - The Oscar race of 2007 has begun with a pair of grim films capturing attention over more widely-hyped movies, indicating to awards watchers that the race for Hollywood's most prestigious awards is wide open.
Top critics groups in New York and Los Angeles weighed in with their picks on Monday and Tuesday, surprising many with their sombre choices of movies based on real life tragedies.
The Los Angeles Film Critics Association named a movie the public has not yet seen, Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, about the World War 2 battle from the view of doomed Japanese soldiers. The New York Film Critics Circle opted for United 93, a documentary style movie made by Briton Paul Greengrass about the passengers' fatal efforts to stop the 9/11 hijackers aboard that flight.
Both films -- one long gone from theatres and the other set to open on December 20 -- are now talking points in Hollywood's most intense contest in years, one that will move through dozens of minor awards and millions of studio marketing dollars before reaching the big event, the Oscars on February 25.
The two movies were also among the 10 nominees for best film named today by the Broadcast Film Critics Association along with more mainstream fare including musical Dreamgirls and The Departed, made by Martin Scorsese, a giant of American filmmaking who has never won an Oscar.
These are early days in the Oscar battle which will gather steam after the first of the year when industry trade groups start giving their awards.
For now, the calendar's big event is this week's Golden Globe nominations, handed out by the roughly 90-member Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
The Globes, which are to be awarded on January 15, are often seen as a predictor of the Oscar race as New York and LA critics are seen as drawing people's attention to the more worthy efforts of the year.
"The film critics see it as their job to launch new ponies and influence the Oscar race that way," said Oscars expert Tom O'Neil, a columnist for the TheEnvelope.com Website.
But in the past 10 years, only one best film named by the New York Critics went on to win an Oscar and in the same period not one choice by the LA critics did so.
United 93 backer Universal Pictures now has to decide whether to launch an expensive Oscar campaign for the film which is already out on DVD and past history for many moviegoers.
Warner Bros. has a similar decision to make about Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood's second film about the devastating battle in a year. First he released Flags of Our Fathers, a powerful anti-war film from the American perspective that tanked at the box office, taking its Oscar chances with it.
But now the critics are raving about Letters, a much smaller film made in Japanese with an all-Japanese cast.
"I think this is an amazing film," said Time magazine critic Richard Schickel, a biographer of Eastwood's.
"It shows a nation just totally lost in its own excesses. The Japanese had no exit strategy or rather their exit strategy was for everyone to die in place," he added.
Some in Hollywood are wondering if Eastwood and Warner Bros. are following the same strategy with Letters as they did with 2004's boxing drama Million Dollar Baby. It, too, opened late in December, won raves from critics and audiences and went on to win the best picture Oscar.
- REUTERS
