AFI Top 10 Films of the Year

The American Film Institute (AFI) announced its top 10 films of the year and while there were the usual suspects that we’ve seen in this first week of awards season, there were some glaring misses too. Blue Jasmine missed and August: Osage County, which has barely made a blip with the critics awards failed to get a mention here. Sundance winner and critical hit Fruitvale Station made the cut despite not making many critics awards lists outside of the Breakthrough categories for director Ryan Coogler and actor Michael B. Jordan. Spike Jonze’s Her, which is enjoying major critics awards success was also included. The last three years has seen AFI matching with Oscar’s Best Picture nominees quite closely, sometimes only leaving one or two off and even though sometimes due to eligibility (films need to be U.S. productions to qualify).

The full list:

AFI MOVIES OF THE YEAR
12 Years a Slave
American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Fruitvale Station
Gravity
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
Nebraska
Saving Mr. Banks
The Wolf of Wall Street

As a reference, here are their past choices from the last five years (Oscar BP noms in bold)

2012:
Argo
Beasts of the Southern Wild
The Dark Knight Rises
Django Unchained
Les Misérables
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Moonrise Kingdom
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty

2011:
Bridesmaids
The Descendants
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Help
Hugo
J. Edgar
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse
Nominated instead: The Artist*, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

2010:
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
127 Hours
The Social Network
The Town
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone
Nominated instead: The King’s Speech* **

2009:
Coraline
The Hangover
The Messenger
Precious
A Serious Man
A Single Man
Sugar
Up
Up in the Air
The Hurt Locker
Nominated instead: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9*, An Education*, Inglourious Basterds,

2008:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Frozen River
Gran Torino
Iron Man
Milk
WALL·E
Wendy and Lucy
The Wrestler
Nominated instead: The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire* **

*denotes a film that was ineligible for the AFI award.

** denotes Best Picture Oscar winner that year.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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