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Associated Press in Los Angeles

The French-language drama Amour was chosen on Sunday as the year’s best film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, whose prizes are among a flurry of year-end honours that help sort out the Academy Awards race.
Among the group’s other honours, the 1950s cult drama The Master earned four awards: best director for Paul Thomas Anderson, best actor for Joaquin Phoenix, supporting actress for Amy Adams and production design for David Crank and Jack Fisk.
The Master also was chosen as best-picture runner-up. The film stars Phoenix as a volatile second world war veteran who comes under the sway of a charismatic cult leader. Adams co-stars as the cult leader’s tough-minded wife.
Amour star Emmanuelle Riva, who plays an elderly, ailing woman being cared for by her husband, shared the best-actress honour in a tie with Jennifer Lawrence of the lost-soul romance Silver Linings Playbook.
Newcomer Dwight Henry was chosen as supporting actor for the low-budget critical darling Beasts of the Southern Wild. The film’s writer-director, Benh Zeitlin, received the group’s New Generation Award and shared the prize for best music score with composing partner Dan Romer.
Directed by Michael Haneke, Amour is Austria’s entry for the foreign-language Oscar and won the top honour at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The choice by the Los Angeles critics marked a move away from bigger Hollywood productions that the group favoured the last two years when it named George Clooney’s The Descendants as the best film of last year and David Fincher’s The Social Network as tops for 2010.
The critics’ picks came days after both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review chose Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden manhunt docudrama Zero Dark Thirty as the year’s best film.
Bigelow, who dominated the 2009 LA critics awards with best-picture and director wins for The Hurt Locker, was chosen this time as directing runner-up for Zero Dark Thirty.
The Hurt Locker went on to a best-picture win at the Oscars and made Bigelow the first woman ever to earn the best-director Oscar. Bigelow is considered a potential Oscar favourite again this time around with Zero Dark Thirty.
Shut out at the Los Angeles critics honours was Steven Spielberg’s Civil War epic Lincoln.
Runners-up for the acting honours: Denis Levant of Holy Motors, best actor; Christoph Waltz of Django Unchained, supporting actor; and Anne Hathaway of Les Miserables and The Dark Knight Rises, supporting actress. The French film Holy Motors also was named best foreign-language film, with Israel’s Footnote named runner-up.
Next up on Hollywood’s awards calendar are the Screen Actors Guild nominations on Wednesday and the Golden Globe nominations on Thursday. Oscar nominations follow on January 10.
The Los Angeles group named Tim Burton’s dead-dog tale Frankenweenie best animated film. Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day was runner-up.
The documentary prize went to The Gatekeepers, director Dror Moreh’s exploration of intelligence operations by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency. The runner-up was Searching for Sugar Man, Malik Bendjelloul’s portrait of obscure 1970s singer-songwriter Rodriguez.
Chris Terrio earned the screenplay honour for Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage-crisis thriller Argo. David O Russell was the screenplay runner-up for Silver Linings Playbook.
The critics group gave its first-ever prize for film editing to Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg for Zero Dark Thirty. Goldenberg also was the editing runner-up for Argo.


‘Amour’ takes top prize from LA film critics