Let the awards begin...

The National Board of Review, always the first to dish out the end-of-the-year awards, named Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima the best film of 2006. Iwo Jima is the sequel to his Flags of Our Fathers which tanked at the box office earlier this year. The National Board of Review rarely sets the stage for the Academy Awards, so we'll see what happens when the other awards roll out.

The awards are as follows:

Best Film: Letters from Iwo Jima - dir. Clint Eastwood

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland)

Best Actress: Helen Mirren (The Queen)

Best Supporting Actor: Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond)

Best Supporting Actress: Catherine O'Hara (For Your Consideration)

Best Director: Martin Scorsese (The Departed)

Best Foreign Film: Volver - dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Best Animated Film: Cars - dir. John Lasseter, Joe Ranft

Best Documentary: An Inconvenient Truth - dir. Davis Guggenheim

The 10 Best Films of 2006 (the rest listed alphabetically):
Letters from Iwo Jima
Babel - dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu
Blood Diamond - dir. Edward Zwick
The Departed - dir. Martin Scorsese
The Devil Wears Prada - dir. David Frankel
Flags of Our Fathers - dir. Clint Eastwood
The History Boys - dir. Nicholas Hytner
Little Miss Sunshine - dir. Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
Notes on a Scandal - dir. Richard Eyre
The Painted Veil - dir. John Curran

As you can guess, I'm pretty weary of these awards, though I'm pleased (and not surprised) to see Volver winning in the best foreign film category. I really must be in the minority with a lot of films as I thought O'Hara was uncomfortable in Consideration and thought Cars sucked. In the case of Cars though, it has little competition in its category; its only potential opponents would be DreamWorks' Over the Hedge and Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. You may remember though that Linklater's superior Waking Life wasn't nominated in the Academy's first Best Animated Feature category; instead, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius was. This will likely be the first of many awards for Mirren, who's the front-runner for Best Actress this year. It'll hopefully be the last of the awards handed out to Babel, but that's just wishful thinking.