Like the family Golden Retriever plopping your favorite pair of slippers by your feet, we bring you yet another year-end critics' list round-up:
· We like The Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association's style: No confusing nomination procedures rewarding regular and "Texan" film—just a straightforward list of winners. United 93 takes another best film honor, as United Airlines executives start to feel more and more conflicted over the scads of free integrated branding they'll probably enjoy at this year's Oscars ceremony. Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Martin Scorsese round out the big categories. [Variety]
· The AP reviewers list their top 10 films of 2006: The Queen, United 93, and Little Miss Sunshine make both lists, while Snakes on a Plane makes neither. Luckily, Stephen King compiles his own list for Entertainment Weekly, so the movie that you either wanted to see, or for the most part didn't, doesn't come away completely empty-handed. [AP, EW]
· The Queen's director Stephen Frears, writer Peter Morgan, producer Andy Harries and star Helen Mirren have all been invited by the real Queen's secretary for lunch at Buckingham Palace, where they'll either be subjected to Her Majesty's glowing words for their honest yet humanizing depiction of the monarch during a time of national crisis, or never be heard from again. [Time Out]

· The International Press Academy (sort of like the HFPA, but even more international and obscure) presented their Satellite Awards in the Beverly Hills le Méridien ballroom Sunday. Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker get best acting nods for a drama, while Bill Condon and Clint Eastwood (for Flags) tie for best director, in a contest with a category and winner for just about everything. (A Lifetime movie picked up multiple awards.) [Variety]
· The Black Reel Awards give the most nominations to—surprise!—Dreamgirls, with nods also to Pursuit of Happyness, Inside Man, Akeelah and the Bee, Idelwild and more. Shockingly, Big Momma's House 2 is completely shut out, not even recognized for a Special Makeup Award For Excellence in Fat-Suit Drag Achievement. [BlackReelAwards]
· The London Film Critics' Circle has a massive list of nominees divided into regular and "British film" categories. British actors (Helen Mirren, Judi Dench) are nominated in both acting categories, yet Kate Winslet gets a Best British Actress nomination for Little Children, but doesn't make the Best Actress cut. To make matters more confusing, some 2005 films which presumably got later releases in the U.K.—Capote, The Squid and the Whale—got multiple nominations. [shadowsonthewall.co.uk]

With no Golden Globes story line as compelling as last year's tension over whether or not the Hollywood Foreign Press Association would pit Heath Ledger's mumble-mouthed rancher against Jake Gyllenhaal's dreamy-eyed-yet-mercurial cowpoke (or, more accurately, "sheep-poke") bottom, we suppose we'll have to settle for the one you're going to be reading about all day: the double nominations of Clint Eastwood in the directing category (for both of his World War II movies) and Leonardo DiCaprio's dual Best Actor nods for The Departed and Blood Diamond. For those so inclined, squeezing one's eyes shut and imagining the steamy Leo-on-Leo action of DiCaprio's Boston cop and South African smuggler wrestling over the gilded Globe statue while grunting in passable Southie and Afrikaner accents might fill the erotic void left by the celebrated gay cowboys. In other multiple nominations news, Helen Mirren was recognized for playing both Elizabeth I in a TV miniseries and Elizabeth II in The Queen, an achievement that we genuinely hope you won't use to concoct transgressive, cross-generational fantasies that sully the monarchy. Leave the queens alone, sicky.

· The mavericks of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle give their top honors—picture and directing—to Todd Fields' Little Children. Helen Mirren wins best actress for The Queen, a status quo concession they make up for by awarding Sacha Baron Cohen best actor for his Pamela Anderson-stalking work in Borat. Screenplay honors go to the hardboiled, Raymond-Chandler-meets-Degrassi indie, Brick. [SFFCC.org]
· Time's Richard Corliss gives us yet more insight into the shadowy goings on behind the closed doors of the New York Film Circle's annual gang bang ("The job is simple: tear yellow-lined paper into cracker-size bits; write a name or three on one piece; wait while the names are read out and tabulated," he writes, grippingly), and does some actual math to figure out if these lists actually predict Oscar results. Answer: Yes, they do! Occasionally. [Time.com]
· Clint vs. Clint. Leo vs. Leo. Peter vs. Peter. (Morgan: he wrote The Queen and Last King of Scotland.) In a bounty year of award-worthy output, will ceremonies like the Golden Globes (nominations out this Thursday) see multiple nods for single artists who did double-duty, or will vote-splitting end up cancelling them out? [LAT]
· Letters From Iwo Jima and United 93's strong showing in critics' polls puts the underhyped downer movies high on Academy members' radars; Ellen DeGeneres and her writers are already salivating at the hilarious opening montage sequence in which she single-handedly foils the plans of a group of 9-11 terrorists, only to jet-pack to the ground and find herself trapped in a Japanese internment camp. [Reuters]

Once a year, our nation's most esteemed movie critics lock themselves inside smokey, windowless rooms, and heatedly debate, Twelve Angry Men-style, the relative merits of what they have seen over the previous twelve months. It can often escalate into full-on violence—at the New York Film Critics Circle deliberations this year, for example, The New Yorker's David Denby reportedly had The Observer's octogenarian critic-in-residence Andrew Sarris in a half nelson in a dispute over Ryan Gosling's performance in the film of the same name—but inevitably, a consensus is reached, giving obsessive Oscar prognosticators key pieces of evidence to jot down on index cards and affix in perfectly aligned columns to their bedroom walls. A round-up of the results of four major critics' lists:

Last night at the after-party for the Directors Guild of America awards, Dame Helen Mirren put down her gin and asked a fellow party-goer if she could ride his Segway. When the press isn't around and guards are let down, you'll catch these sorts of private, goofy moments when celebrities are just human — and then you will take pictures, and you'll post them on your blog.