Best Film of the Year refers to vision and direction that pay sensitive and keen attention to both the language of cinema (“presentation”) and social reality (“representation”), in the process re-functioning the possibilities of film as progressive art and popular culture.
Best Screenplay refers to the rhetoric of writing for film that articulates the complexity of social life and personal perturbation through narrative logic or political conviction; or simply through well-thought out dramatic tension that explores contestation between the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, the private and the public. The Best Screenplay award is given to the writer of the film.
Best Performance refers to acting, to the playing out of a role or character that implicates emotion, feeling, and experience in the social conditions of the personal and in the political economies of habit and gesture and how these forge the body politic. The Best Performance citation is handed to the Performer, whether male or female, adult or child, in major or supporting role, individual or ensemble.
Best Achievement in Cinematography and Visual Design refers to the mise-en-scene and its visual/plastic qualities production design, lighting, art direction, visual effects that lend form to whatever representation is projected on screen. The Best Cinematography and Visual Design honor is conferred on the cinematographer and the production designer.