Does Hollywood heed critics?

The New York Film Critics Circle Awards are generally tarted up and strutted out (by the group’s own publicists!) as being precursors to the Oscars, which is something either group could protest as a gross slur upon its character.

The East Coast group would not, for instance, ever select as artistically dubious a filmmaker as Ron Howard as best director (as the Oscars did last year). The West Coast-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would be loath to select a commercially modest masterpiece like “Far From Heaven” as its best picture (as the circle did Dec. 16).

Seldom the twain shall meet. In fact, you have to go back to 1993 to find the two outfits agreeing on a year’s best film -- in that case, “Schindler’s List.” In 1991, the groups also saw eye-to-eye on “The Silence of the Lambs.”

No, the importance to the Oscar race of the New York group (to which all three Newsday critics belong, along with 30-odd others -- and I mean odd) is that it puts people and movies in contention. That the choices might have any value as a judge of film quality is of distant, secondary importance to the industry.

Meanwhile, however, talent reaps the benefits. Diane Lane, selected as best actress in New York for her rather splendid work in the unsplendid “Unfaithful,” now seems to have an academy nomination in her pocket. “Far From Heaven,” the Todd Haynes hommage to Douglas Sirk, now has Oscar legs: With New York awards for director, best supporting actor (Dennis Quaid), best supporting actress (Patricia Clarkson) and cinematography (by Ed Lachmann), it would seem a likely beneficiary of academy members’ fear of being thought of as philistines.

The thing is, there are so many critics’ awards that their effect gets diluted. If you’re a movie company with a movie you’d like to have win awards, there is usually a group that will accommodate you. The esteemed Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. recently gave the wonderful “About Schmidt” its big prize. New York Film Critics Online, a group that seems open to anyone who can access a Web site, picked “Chicago.” The National Board of Review selected “The Hours.” The International Documentary Assn. picked “Bowling for Columbine,” not just as the year’s best documentary but as the best ever. That’s right, ever.

Someone used to say to me, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,” a piece of advice that obviously went in one ear and out the other.

That would mean the end of meaningful criticism as we know it. Sometimes saying something nice -- even if you do it in what scholarscall implied speech, as in the bestowing of an award -- is the most effective, constructive thing a critic can do. No one’s writing is going to stop anyone from seeing “Maid in Manhattan,” if the viewer is really so sadly inclined. But last year there would have been no future or even, perhaps, a release for “In the Bedroom,” and the Oscar nomination for Sissy Spacek, without massive critical support for Todd Fields’ movie.

This year, how many people would have seen the exquisite “Spirited Away” if it hadn’t received so many four-star reviews? “Russian Ark,” one of this or any other year’s great films, will have a life (even if the New York circle overlooked it) because of critics.

This has been a good year, all in all. Yes, there were lumbering, bloated spectacles (“Four Feathers”), painful embarrassments (“The Banger Sisters”) and unspeakable nightmares (“Swept Away”). On the other hand, there was a resurgence in auteurish films such as “Far From Heaven,” “Adaptation,” “Solaris” and “Talk to Her.” I I think the support system has reasons to be happy.

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John Anderson is a film critic at Newsday, a Tribune company.