LONG LIVE LINCOLN: Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln was named the best film of 2012 by the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association. However Spielberg did not take the director’s award, which went to Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty. Lead acting honors went to Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln) and Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) while a pair of Lincoln players (Tommy Lee Jones and Sally Field) earned the supporting acting awards. Yours truly is a member of the critics group and also voted for Bigelow and Chastain. But I wasn’t as hot on Lincoln as everyone else was, so I picked Joaquin Phoenix (The Master), Javier Bardem (Skyfall) and Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables) in the other acting categories. And my top film is a movie that grabbed me way back in the spring and never let go: Moonrise Kingdom. I’ll be posting my top 10 list next week; you can catch all of the DFWCA list on our website.

LONG LIFE FILM: It’s always a surprise to see which films are named each year to the National Film Registry. Another 25 movies were put on the list this year – some of them big names such as The Matrix and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But if you scroll further down the list, you’ll find The Kidnappers Foil by Dallas’ Melton Barker. Barker made more than 200 versions of the film from the 30s to the 70s. In each, he cast children whose parents paid a small fee and made a Little Rascals-style comedy that played in little community theaters around the state. You can actually watch some of them on the Texas Archive of the Moving Image’s website.

QUOTABLE: “You know, you can’t go to the mall and be Hamlet; you can’t take the character out of the show and have it relate. Not only does the Blue Man work in the show, take it out the door and people are still curious.”

– Shane Andres, one of the Blue Men who will be playing the Winspear Opera House next week, in an interview with dallasnews.com. Want to see the show? Enter to win this week’s big deal giveaway.