Making Sense of This Week's Flurry of Awards & NomsGothams, NBR, NY Film Critics Circle and Indie Spirits, oh my! What they all mean for the state of the Oscar race
One last reminder: I’ll be going live on Substack on Monday morning around 8:45 am Eastern to break down the Golden Globe nominations with my friend and previous Prestige Junkie podcast guest Esther Zuckerman. Get the Substack app to get a notification when we’re live, and see you there! As you might have heard, we’re handing out some awards this week! Four different groups have made their picks for the standout films of the year, three of them based in New York — don’t worry, Los Angeles, you’ll reclaim your spot at the center of awards season soon enough — and all of them with quirks that often make their choices very different from the Oscars. Yet, as we always do, my fellow pundits and I have found a lot of tea leaves to read this week, from emerging critical darlings to the acting races that are still very wide open. Later in this edition, I’ll have a look ahead at one of the last campaign stops of the year, all the way up in San Francisco, where some final pushes of momentum can take place before the holiday break. But first, an attempt to make sense of what happened this week at the Gotham Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Independent Spirit Awards nominations, and the picks from the National Board of Review. Let’s go!
The Sing Sing SurgePlease allow me the indulgence of starting by saying: I told you so!
Ever since I first saw Sing Sing back at the Toronto Film Festival in 2023, when it was a tiny indie with no distributor, I’ve been a big believer in the emotional, prison-set drama’s potential to win over audiences. Though its theatrical release over the summer from A24 was fairly quiet, it’s been screening ever since for Academy and guild audiences, with reports of rapturous responses basically every time. If we’re looking for a CODA in this year’s awards season — a seemingly small and forgotten film that surges back into the race — Sing Sing is absolutely it. Winning two acting awards at the Gothams, for star Colman Domingo and star and co-writer Clarence Maclin, was a sign that it can do exactly that. An even bigger sign was the huge response in the room to both Domingo and Maclin’s wins, not unlike the warm reception I witnessed for Domingo when he delivered the opening remarks at the Governors Awards a few weeks ago. Following up those Gotham wins with Independent Spirit Award nominations for best film as well as for Domingo and Maclin, plus a mention on the National Board of Review’s top 10 of the year, confirms that Sing Sing is very much among the top tier of indies in the race this year. But it may not get quite the critical boost as some of the other indies that have been shining this week. The Most Darling of the Critical Darlings At the risk of reading too much into the results of one critics group vote, the New York Film Critics Circle picks on Tuesday confirmed the three titles I had suspected would emerge as the year’s major critical favorites. Giving best picture to The Brutalist, best director to RaMell Ross for Nickel Boys, and best screenplay to Sean Baker for Anora, the group effectively gave an award apiece to the three most critically acclaimed films of the year. The Brutalist and Nickel Boys both picked up an additional NYFCC prize: The Brutalist for Adrien Brody’s lead performance, Nickel Boys for Jomo Fray’s stunning cinematography.  But each had a more limited presence at the Indie Spirit Awards. There, Anora tied with I Saw the TV Glow, another excellent indie I’ve been rooting hard for, with six nominations apiece. Then The Brutalist and Nickel Boys were shut out entirely by the NBR, while Anora had to settle for just a top 10 mention and a breakthrough acting prize for Mikey Madison. If these results sound all over the place, well, that’s the kind of season it’s been. But I would expect more good news for at least one of these films — if not all of them — when the Los Angeles critics vote on Sunday and as even more critics groups weigh in throughout December. Wicked Momentum Continues The National Board of Review, a New York-based group of 130 self-described “film enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals, academics and students,” are always a fascinating X factor at this point in awards season. They’re possibly even more mysterious than the Golden Globes, but because they don’t have a lucrative TV contract or a mercurial owner, they don’t attract the same level of attention. But like the Golden Globes they sure are capable of surprise, as they did by not only naming Wicked as their best picture, but Jon M. Chu as best director and bestowing a special spotlight award on “The Creative Collaboration of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.” (One awards publicist cracked to me that the award meant that some voters’ grandchildren really, really wanted to meet Grande at the NBR awards dinner in January.) The NBR’s best picture winner doesn’t often become the Oscar champ — last year it picked Killers of the Flower Moon, as just one example — but it does have a knack for identifying populist picks that will factor heavily into the best picture race. Two years ago, the group picked Top Gun: Maverick back when most of us were wondering just how big of a contender it would be. In 2018, it gave best film to Green Book. Wicked was never going to factor into the Indie Spirits nominations or most critics groups, but the NBR win will almost certainly lead to big nomination tallies from the Golden Globes — watch out, musical/comedy categories — and Critics Choice next week. What I still don’t know, and nobody else does either, is how strong Wicked will be against those critical darlings mentioned above, once actual Oscar voters get a ballot in their hands. But there’s one category where Wicked is stronger than all the others . . . Supporting Actress Mysteries! Carol Kane’s win with the NYFCC for supporting actress was a classic example of that small group going its own way. Though it’s entirely possible she’ll build some genuine Oscar buzz for her role in Between the Temples, I would bet this is the beginning and end of Kane’s awards season run. (Her acceptance speech at the NYFCC dinner in January, however, may turn out to be the best moment of the entire season, if her Kimmy Schmidt performance is any indication). Then there’s Elle Fanning, the National Board of Review’s best supporting actress pick, who is part of the very buzzy A Complete Unknown but had been overshadowed in the early chatter by Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez. Neither of them made the Indie Spirits list, and it’s entirely possible they’ll be left out of the Golden Globes and Critics Choice nominations next week — and we’ll be even more puzzled than we are now about who’s actually ahead in this most wide-open acting race. The biggest wild card in the category remains Grande, who could be the best chance for Wicked to take home a major award. She’s nearly certain to be nominated by the Globes and Critics Choice, but only if she wins at either of those awards shows in early January will she actually be cemented as the category’s frontrunner — and we’ve got a month of speculation to go from there. Awards Night in San Francisco
There are clearly some films that will head into the holiday break with wind behind their back thanks to all this critical attention. If you didn’t have Sing Sing or Between the Temples on your screener priority list, you probably do now. But there are still some in-person opportunities to get your film out there, no matter what the flacks dodging your calls might say. On Monday, a contingent of awards contenders will head to San Francisco for SFFILM’s annual Awards Night, both a gala tribute to some of the year’s best films and a major fundraiser for the nonprofit. “It’s an evening to bring folks together who believe in film, who believe in the power of cinema to transform and to connect, who want to see people at the peak of their craft and their career, and to believe in supporting a good cause,” says Jessie Fairbanks, a film festival veteran who’s been SFFILM’s director of programming since 2021. “So all of those things really help one another, and there's a really lovely symbiosis between the different elements.” SFFILM hosts its annual film festival in the spring and also supports a variety of education programs and filmmaker grants year-round. Awards Night is a standalone event timed to the peak of awards season, honoring hopefuls not just for their most recent acclaimed work, but for everything that led to this point. This year’s honorees — Dune Part Two director Denis Villeneuve, The Piano Lesson director Malcolm Washington, Saturday Night director Jason Reitman and The Substance star Demi Moore — have all been celebrated for their work throughout awards season. But Fairbanks seeks to have Awards Night stand out, from actually allowing the honorees to spend time together to speeches that bring the focus back to arts organizations (like SFFILM) that can make some of these film careers possible. “They stand in the room and they talk about their careers and how they got started, and they talk about how arts organizations that provide mentorship — and festivals that put their first film on screen — are so meaningful to their careers,” Fairbanks recalls about some previous honorees. Like many of the other places that host film festivals throughout the fall, San Francisco has a high quantity of Oscar voters, many of whom will be in the audience during the Awards Night gala. Fairbanks, who moved from New York to San Francisco during COVID lockdowns, says she’s consistently amazed at not just how many successful filmmakers don’t just come from the Bay Area, but stay, creating their own outpost of Hollywood. “When people continue to succeed and join a guild as a voter, they don't leave,” she says. “They stay because their community is here. The entire ecosystem of our industry is here.”
Image credits: Colman Domingo (Nina Westervelt/WWD via Getty Images); Mikey Madison (Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images); Adrien Brody (Taylor Hill/WireImage); Ariana Grande (Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images); Carole Kane (Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images)Follow us: X | Facebook | Instagram | Threads ICYMI
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