AFI Boosts Knocked Up

Mon., Dec. 17, 2007 5:34 AM PST by Joal Ryan

Knocked Up has been delivered to awards-show season. Finally.

The unplanned pregnancy comedy, shut out of the Golden Globes and passed over by the L.A. and New York critics, was one of 10 films selected Sunday for the American Film Institute's year-end honors.

The little-watched TV series Mad Men and Tell Me You Love Me were among AFI's small-screen honorees.

Unlike most critics' awards or the Globes, AFI's judges pick 10 movies and 10 TV shows as the best of the year. There is no winner of the winners; there is no slate of nominees—just two lists, presented in nonjudgmental, alphabetical order.

The Movies of the Year list will look familiar to anyone who's been following the pre-Oscar heats: The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and, from the animation contingent, Pixar-Disney's Ratatouille are all there.

Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, one of the best-reviewed movies of the year, crashed the kudos for the first time this season, thanks to the AFI. It joins Juno, the unplanned-pregnancy comedy of the indie set, on the group's good side.

Rounding out the Top 10 are four movies that have had their ups and downs on the Oscar circuit: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, the Sidney Lumet thriller about a caper gone wrong; Michael Clayton, the underperforming George Clooney drama that was revived last week with some key Globe nominations; The Savages, the sibling comedy-drama that was doing just swell until it was (almost) entirely overlooked by the Globes; and Sean Penn's Into the Wild, which, like The Savages, didn't translate to the Hollywood Foreign Press.

Atonement, which led all Globe contenders with seven nominations, did not make the cut, presumably on account of its British accent. Only U.S.-made films were eligible.

Oscar hopefuls such as Charlie Wilson's War, Eastern Promises, The Great Debaters and Sweeney Todd were eligible. They just weren't honored.

Last year, three AFI honorees—Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima and Little Miss Sunshine—ended up in the Best Picture race at the Academy Awards. But the eventual Oscar winner, The Departed, took the trophy without any help or endorsement from the film group.

In the television category, the obscure, ad-agency drama Mad Men and the obscurer relationship drama Tell Me You Love Me join Dexter, Everybody Hates Chris, Friday Night Lights, Longford, Pushing Daisies, 30 Rock, Ugly Betty and, in what could be its last hurrah, the dearly departed The Sopranos.

The AFI will present its year-end awards Jan. 11 in Los Angeles.