The National Society of Film Critics selected “Amour” as the best picture of 2012 during its annual meeting Saturday.
The critics chose the star of “Amour,” Emmanuelle Riva, as the best actress, and Daniel Day-Lewis was chosen best actor for “Lincoln.”
The group of 60 prominent movie critics from around the country met at Lincoln Center in New York City to make its picks.
Austrian director Michael Haneke won best director for “Amour.” The French-language movie depicts the slow deterioration of the elderly woman played by Riva. It has been praised as an unflinching look at old age and life’s end.
Playwright Tony Kushner won best screenplay for “Lincoln.”
Amy Adams was chosen best supporting actress for “The Master,” and Matthew McConaughey was selected best supporting actor for “Magic Mike” and “Bernie.”
The prize for best nonfiction film went to “The Gatekeepers,” director Dror Moreh’s exploration of intelligence operations by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency.
Mihai Malaimaire was honored for best cinematography for “The Master.”
The film critics’ society, founded in 1966, works to promote film preservation and historically important movies.
This year’s awards were dedicated to the late Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris, a founding member of the society, who died last year.
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More