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Borat Crashes Critics Awards

Los Angeles critics have made benefit for the glorious acting of Sacha Baron Cohen.

Cohen, the star and instigator behind the litigation-inspiring Borat, was named Best Actor Sunday by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Cohen shared the honor with Forest Whitaker, likewise named Best Actor for his turn as dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.

Whitaker's win was his second in four days—the National Board of Review earlier made him its Best Actor choice, too.

The L.A. critics, who as the Cohen pick demonstrates, don't often seem concerned with keeping up with the award show Jonses, seemed almost completely in sync with the historians of the NBR.

Like the NBR, the L.A critics tapped Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima Best Picture, The Queen's Helen Mirren Best Actress, and the Al Gore-narrated An Inconvenient Truth Best Documentary.

Borat, meanwhile, found further Oscar-ad fodder from the American Film Institute, which was out Sunday with its own year-end awards.

The guerrilla comedy, pitting Cohen's Kazakhstani alter ego against unawares Americans, made the AFI's Movies of the Year list, an alphabetical accounting of the top 10 U.S.-made films.

Letters from Iwo Jima made the AFI cut, too; Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood's companion piece, didn't.

Eastwood almost, but not quite notched a Best Director win for both World War II films from the L.A critics--his second-place finish a matter of the public record as the group announces runners-up in each category.
Complete the 32nd annual Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards: here