· The Oklahoma Film Critics Circle name United 93 last year's best film, Martin Scorsese best director, and Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker best actress and actor. They stray from the pack with the addition of two unusual categories, "Obviously Worst Film," and "Not So Obviously Worst Film," which go to Basic Instinct 2 and Bobby, respectively. [Oklahomafilm]
· Utah Film Critics Association also award United 93 their best film prize, but opt to give Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón the best director nod for Children of Men. Best actor goes to Sacha Baron Cohen—the only category not to feature a runner-up, proving Cohen had unanimously astounded Utah's tastemaking elite with his Jew- and Gypsy-leery character's picaresque adventures. [Variety]
· The African-American Film Critics Association lavishes their love upon Dreamgirls, naming it best picture, Bill Condon best director, and giving best supporting acting awards to Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson. Forest Whitaker wins best actor, and in the "one of these things is not like the other" slot is Helen Mirren for her work in The Queen. [The Envelope]

The Best Week Ever blog continues their "10 Best 10 Best Lists of 2006" with #3, The 10 Gayest Moments of 2006. It reads as a pretty hysterical stroll down this year's yellow-bricked memory lane, including such highlights as #9 ("The 6-foot Long Hoagie That is the Jake/Lance/McConaughey Sandwich"), #7's Ryan Seacrest/Teri Hatcher photo-op smooching session ("'Anus-Mouth' has never made more sense in our eyes,") and this write-up of the one movie sure to represent the Rainbow Rebellion at this year's Oscars, Dreamgirls:

· The International Press Academy (sort of like the HFPA, but even more international and obscure) presented their Satellite Awards in the Beverly Hills le Méridien ballroom Sunday. Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker get best acting nods for a drama, while Bill Condon and Clint Eastwood (for Flags) tie for best director, in a contest with a category and winner for just about everything. (A Lifetime movie picked up multiple awards.) [Variety]
· The Black Reel Awards give the most nominations to—surprise!—Dreamgirls, with nods also to Pursuit of Happyness, Inside Man, Akeelah and the Bee, Idelwild and more. Shockingly, Big Momma's House 2 is completely shut out, not even recognized for a Special Makeup Award For Excellence in Fat-Suit Drag Achievement. [BlackReelAwards]
· The London Film Critics' Circle has a massive list of nominees divided into regular and "British film" categories. British actors (Helen Mirren, Judi Dench) are nominated in both acting categories, yet Kate Winslet gets a Best British Actress nomination for Little Children, but doesn't make the Best Actress cut. To make matters more confusing, some 2005 films which presumably got later releases in the U.K.—Capote, The Squid and the Whale—got multiple nominations. [shadowsonthewall.co.uk]

• The Soup: Dreamgirls [YouTube]

We here at Defamer love the holiday season for no other reason than the bounty of movie critics' year-end lists and awards it brings us, like decrees handed down from on high from our pull-quote producing, thumb-direction-assigning cinematic sages. The Broadcast Film Critics Association adds another layer of intrigue to the process, dragging things out heightening the suspense by first releasing a list of nominees in every category, and later announcing the winners at the E!-broadcast Critics' Choice Awards—a mini-Oscars, as it were, only with the added feature of having Ryan Seacrest backstage to helpfully offer select Best Actor and Supporting Actor nominees stress-relieving lower back rubs. A partial list of the nominees, from The Envelope:

Once a year, our nation's most esteemed movie critics lock themselves inside smokey, windowless rooms, and heatedly debate, Twelve Angry Men-style, the relative merits of what they have seen over the previous twelve months. It can often escalate into full-on violence—at the New York Film Critics Circle deliberations this year, for example, The New Yorker's David Denby reportedly had The Observer's octogenarian critic-in-residence Andrew Sarris in a half nelson in a dispute over Ryan Gosling's performance in the film of the same name—but inevitably, a consensus is reached, giving obsessive Oscar prognosticators key pieces of evidence to jot down on index cards and affix in perfectly aligned columns to their bedroom walls. A round-up of the results of four major critics' lists:

Before a flawlessly put-together mob of angry Gays storms the courtyard of the 8000 Sunset shopping complex to topple the 68-foot statue of Jennifer Hudson they have erected in her honor, the star of Dreamgirls has released several statements intended to counter remarks attributed to her yesterday in a Dallas gay newspaper in which she allegedly called homosexuality "a sin." Her MySpace blog entry puts her current mood at "depressed," and goes on to say that "some paper is saying that I have a problem with gay people. Its just mean and wrong... Anybody that knows me, knows that just ain't true." A second statement, sent to The Advocate (whose current cover features Hudson) and forwarded to us, had this to say:

There exists in all of Gaydom perhaps no greater paradox than the one represented by the inner struggle of the Bible-thumping diva, who would have no career if not for the Gays who idolize them, but whose strict religious upbringing teaches them that God looks unkindly on the shirtless, sodomizing hordes gazing worshipfully up at them from the dancefloors below. No, not even Jennifer Hudson, recently anointed Gay Man's Messiah for her up-from-the-American-Idol-ashes, Beyoncé-upstaging turn as Effie in Dreamgirls, is immune from the fanbase-alienating phenomenon. The Dallas Voice recently interviewed Hudson—who until now has expressed a very pro-Gay attitude in the media—and found the Next Big Thing still carries with her some old-fashioned attitudes: