I’m a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and am currently serving on the three-person Governing Committee, which obligates you to refer to me as Governor Snider. But that is beside the point. The point is that our 143 members have voted on the 13th annual OFCS Awards, and the winners are as follows (links are to my reviews):

Best Picture: “The Hurt Locker”
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker”
Best Actor: Jeremy Renner, “The Hurt Locker”
Best Actress: Melanie Laurent, “Inglourious Basterds”
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, “Inglourious Basterds”
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, “Precious”
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, “Inglourious Basterds”
Best Adapted Screenplay: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” based on a book by Roald Dahl
Best Documentary: “Anvil!: The Story of Anvil”
Best Picture Not in the English Language: “The White Ribbon”
Best Animated Feature: “Up”
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, “Inglourious Basterds”
Best Score: Michael Giacchino, “Up”
Best Editing: Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, “The Hurt Locker”

(If you want to see the nominees that were previously selected, the list is here.)

In several cases the films I voted for didn’t win, but I’m not disappointed by any of the results. They’re all very solid choices. I note with some interest that “Avatar,” though nominated in three categories, didn’t win anything — but James Cameron’s ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow, won Best Director. There’s a pretty good chance it will go that way at the Oscars, too.

More OFCS stuff can be found at our blog.

First, due to popular demand — and due to “New Moon” being really, really easy to make fun of — this week’s Snide Remarks is my rejected “New Moon” screenplay. These things practically write themselves.

At Film.com, the new What’s the Big Deal? column is taking the week off due to the holiday, but Eric’s Bad Movies is here, and in fact has been posted early! It’s a Thanksgiving miracle! The subject is “On Deadly Ground,” starring (and directed by!) Steven Seagal. Can you believe I’ve been doing this for more than a year and a half and this is the first Seagal movie I’ve done? I’ve done a few Van Dammes, though, and they’re pretty much the same.

Finally, allow me to reprint a post from this time last year:

With the Unspecified Holiday Season having descended upon us, you have perhaps wondered, “How can my gift shopping benefit Eric D. Snider?” And the answer lies in the Amazon affiliate program, of which I am a member.

It’s simple. Every time you plan to buy something on Amazon.com, come here to EricDSnider.com first. Under the “Buy Stuff” tab at the top of the page is an option to “Shop on Amazon.com.” Click that, and it takes you to Amazon’s home page, just like normal — except that now there is code embedded in it that will result in a small commission for me on everything you buy in that session.

It’s not a huge amount of money, but it helps cover the web-hosting fees, and it pays the salaries of the Laotian children who work in my sweatshop. It also helps me justify the time spent writing the columns and reviews that nobody’s paying me for, beyond the fact that I like typing and my chair is comfortable.

And hey, you’re shopping at Amazon anyway, so why not? It doesn’t affect anything at all in your shopping experience. It only produces a warm glow in your heart. And that’s really what this season is all about: redirecting incremental portions of holiday-based capitalism to me, Eric D. Snider.

P.S. If you want to bookmark the Eric-encoded Amazon link so you don’t have to come here first every time, this is the URL to bookmark: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2F&tag=thelandoferic&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

P.P.S. It only works for Amazon.com, not Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.uk or any of the other crazy foreign Amazons. If you shop with one of those non-American Amazons, I don’t want your filthy money.

My current bout with clinical depression has led to many comical experiences, and I will tell you about them soon, in the form of a special All-Crazy Edition of “Snide Remarks.” But while I have greatly improved over the last couple weeks, I’m still not back to 100 percent, and I’m still taking it easy.

In the meantime, I wanted to thank you all for the extraordinary outpouring of support and understanding that came after I wrote about this on Sept. 3. I was a little worried when I posted the item that it would seem like I was fishing for sympathy and compliments, when really I just wanted to share with you what was going on. (I also wanted to forestall e-mails from readers wondering why I had not yet reviewed “Halloween II” or whatever.) But the comments you posted — and e-mails and tweets you sent — were astonishingly kind and sincere. I can’t tell you how touched I was. A lot of readers over the years have said things in an attempt to make me cry, but this is the first time anyone has succeeded.

If you’re a writer who consistently gets paying gigs and has been around a while, you tend to assume that there are readers who love your work; why else would they keep reading you? But to actually hear from people saying that my reviews and columns have uplifted them or made them laugh or enlightened them — that what I’ve written has actually made a difference, however small, in their lives — truly brightened my spirits. You have no idea.

It was also heartening to hear from so many readers who said they’ve dealt with depression, too. (I love that a lot of other people have also been miserable! No, that’s not what I mean.) I’m glad the stigma associated with this is lifting, and that people aren’t as hesitant to talk about it as they used to be. Depression is awful enough without also feeling like it’s somehow your fault, or that suffering from it makes you a freak. Maybe it’s good that I’m immune to feelings of embarrassment, because I felt no reluctance whatsoever to talk about it openly. And if my talking about it is helpful to other people with the same illness, or to people who don’t know anything about it and need some educatin’, then hooray.

Like I said, I’m still recuperating, still getting back to normal, taking it one day at a time and doing as much (or as little) work as I’m able. Thank you again for your patience, your loyalty, and your kindness. I truly appreciate it.

I apologize for the vagueness of the note I left a few days ago, indicating I might be absent from my duties for a while. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell you what was going on, only that it was still too early to know the depth or extent of it, and, frankly, I didn’t feel up to the task of explaining. But now I will explain.

I suffer from clinical depression. Or, more accurately, I have clinical depression, but have not “suffered” from it in more than six years. I went on Lexapro in early 2003 to combat relatively mild depression and anxiety symptoms, and things have been fine since then. Friends have said in the last week, “I had no idea you had clinical depression!” And that’s exactly the point — the Lexapro (and its generic cousin that I switched to a couple years ago) did its job very well.

But last week, it stopped working. This is not uncommon. Google “SSRI poop-out syndrome” and you’ll see. From what I gather, it is fairly unusual to be able to pinpoint the exact day that the meds stop working — it was Monday, Aug. 24, for me — but I am, after all, an efficient and orderly person. There wasn’t any life event that caused it. Though my 35th birthday loomed, that was not the breaking point. It just HAPPENED. The drugs lost their effectiveness, and my mood pendulum swung back dramatically in the opposite direction.

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Hello, readers. I wanted to let you know that I’m having some health issues that might prevent me from posting much in the way of movie reviews and other features for the next little while. It’s nothing serious, and there’s no cause for alarm, but it’s difficult for me to work right now. I hope to be up and around and making fun of people again shortly. In the meantime, your thoughts and prayers are appreciated.

- Eric

Over at Cinematical, I wrote a piece called “Happy 25th Birthday, PG-13 Rating!” that you might find interesting. At Film.com, we have another edition of Eric’s Ten-Year Itch, this time examining “Deep Blue Sea,” a shark movie that I still find entertaining a decade later.

Next, take a gander at the right-hand column of this here website and you’ll see two recent changes. One is that I’ve added my Twitter feed so you can see what sort of fascinating observations I make in 140 characters or less, without actually having to use Twitter. I feel like the only legitimate uses of Twitter are 1) sharing amusing links and 2) cracking one-liners, and I’d hate for you non-Twitterers to miss out. As an alternative, you can just ignore it.

The other change is the ad for Dish Network, the one that seems to suggest you can only use that particular satellite TV service if you are Mormon and/or if you intend to watch the LDS General Conference in October. Rest assured, this is not the case! People of all religious inclinations, or of no religious inclination at all, are welcome to use Dish Network. That ad was chosen by the people who choose such things because they knew I had a lot of Mormon readers, and what’s the use in having Mormon readers if you can’t sell things to them? (Of course, most of my Mormon readers live in Utah, where you don’t need satellite, or even cable, to watch General Conference, but shush.)

Anyway, I get a commission if you sign up for Dish Network by calling that phone number, so you should sign up for Dish Network by calling that phone number.

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Quick update: Just landed in Austin for South By Southwest, discovered en route that my laptop has become possessed by a demon, cannot post the usual Friday movie stuff. But my review of “Race to Witch Mountain” is or will be at Cinematical, and the other stuff didn’t screen in time anyway. I’ll get things sorted out Friday and send “In the Dark” out then.

I started writing my weekly column “Snide Remarks” for my college paper way back in 1997, took it with me to the small daily paper I worked for after I graduated, and subsequently made it an online-only feature after that paper fired me. There have been a few gaps and hiatuses here and there, but basically the column has run nearly every week for 11 1/2 years.

In recent months, however, you may have noticed a decline in regularity. New columns have appeared on only 36 of the last 52 Mondays. It’s become like a TV show: a few weeks of new episodes, then a week or two off, then back again for a few weeks, and so forth. The difference is that writing the column was once part of my salary (at the newspapers, and subsequently when we charged a subscription fee to read it here), which meant I was motivated to write it AND had time allotted in which to do so. Now that’s no longer the case, and I have to focus my word-piling energies toward the things that pay the bills. My extravagant lifestyle of Hot Pockets and library books doesn’t come free!

But then I start to feel guilty. I know there are many of you who look forward to reading “Snide Remarks” every Monday, and you have no idea how grateful I am for that. Some of you have been around since the beginning, which is weird, because you’d think you’d have grown out of me by now. And I feel bad having to so frequently say, “Sorry, no column this week.” But I would also feel bad crankin’ out something mediocre just to avoid missing a week.

So we come to this:

As of now, “Snide Remarks” is no longer a weekly column.

It is now a quasi-weekly column. (That’s the best term I can think of. “Occasional” sounds too infrequent.)

When it runs, it will run on Mondays, as usual, and my goal is still to write it every week — the only difference is that you shouldn’t EXPECT it every week.

All that’s required here is an adjustment of perspective. Don’t be disappointed when it doesn’t appear; instead, be delighted when it does.

To be notified when a new “Snide Remarks” is published, you can use the RSS feed or, if you don’t know what “RSS feed” means, you can just get on the e-mailing list. Or you can visit the site every day anyway to read the blog and the movie reviews and stuff.

I appreciate your readership, and I hope you understand my position here. As a special gift to you, here is a picture of me at 17, taken from a video one of my high school classmates posted on Facebook.

It is time once again to solicit suggestions for Eric’s Bad Movies at Film.com. There are far too many bad movies out there for me to keep track of them all, and you guys gave some terrific suggestions last time I asked. I used a bunch of them!

Below is a list of what I’ve already covered. Do not suggest any of these movies or everyone will think you weren’t paying attention. Beyond that, these are the basic criteria (which of course I reserve the right to violate at any time):

1. It needs to be really bad. Mediocre isn’t bad enough. Don’t waste my time with mere mediocrity.

2. It should be universally regarded as bad, not a movie that most people like that you happen to hate. You might personally think “Titanic” is an awful, awful film, but you must realize that this is far from the majority opinion, and thus it is not a suitable film for Eric’s Bad Movies. “Anaconda,” though — everyone can agree on that.

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I am pleased to announce that the archive of my movie reviews (now well north of 2,300 entries) has been revamped to be more searchable, sortable, and time-waste-able than ever before!

You access the Archives under the Movie Reviews tab, and there you’ll find four columns: Movie Title, Rating, Grade, and Date. (That’s the date it was released, not the date I reviewed it.) The default setting is to list them alphabetically by title, but you can click any of the other three labels to sort them that way. Click the label again and it’ll list them in reverse order.

The new improvement is that if you mouse-over a heading, a little arrow will appear at the right-hand side of the column. Click that arrow and new options will be presented to you.

Under Movie Title, you can type in a particular word and have the database call up only the titles that contain that word. Under Rating, you can select one or more ratings (G, PG, etc.) and have it only show those films; the Grade filter does the same thing for the grades (A-F) that I give. Under Date, you can have it show only films released in the last 30 days, or from any of the years 1999-2008, or from pre-1999. And then, of course, you can re-sort the results however you like by clicking the appropriate column.

Furthermore, you can narrow down the results even more by selecting additional options from the other labels. After bringing up, say, only the films released in 2006, you can go under Rating and ask to only see those rated PG or G, and then of those see only the ones that got a B+ or better. Or you could ask how many films from 2004-2007 had the word “Girl” in the title. Or you could see how many F grades I’ve given to R-rated films since 2001. The possibilities are endless!

Thanks to my webbrother Jeff for implementing the new system. A similar scheme has been set up with the “Snide Remarks” columns, and with the individual actor and director pages that you get when you click on a person’s name in a movie review.

Finally, as a matter of housekeeping, I recently went through and fixed the release dates, where necessary, so that they reflect when the films were first released in the United States. In the old days, I went by when the films opened where I lived (Salt Lake City until mid-2005, Portland after that); that system was left over from when I wrote the reviews for a newspaper and we published them when they opened locally, which (in the case of independent, art house, and Oscar-bait films) was often a few weeks after they opened in New York and L.A. Now that I exist only on the Internet, there’s no reason to provide “local” release dates, so I’ve retrofitted the reviews appropriately. None of this matters to you, probably, but I wanted it on the record.