Awards season began this week with the prestigious National Board of Review, which on Tuesday named Steven Spielberg’s The Post its best film of the year in a Top 10 list that also included Baby Driver, Call Me By Your Name, The Disaster Artist, Downsizing, Dunkirk, The Florida Project, Get Out, Lady Bird, Logan, and Phantom Thread. Many of those same films also appear on the list of the New York Film Critics Circle awards announced earlier today, although the New York criterati joined our own Ignatiy Vishnevetsky in their disdain for James Franco’s Timmy Wiseau biopic.
The NYFCC’s bold left-field choice was awarding Tiffany Haddish the Best Supporting Actress award for Girls Trip, making an Oscar campaign for the rising comedy star a likely, and pretty awesome, proposition all of a sudden. Speaking of unlikely-but-welcome Oscars prospects, the NYFCC joined the NBR in paying tribute to Get Out, which could—and maybe this is optimistic—end up as a dark horse Best Picture nominee come next year. (Whether it could actually win is another story.) And if the Academy follows the NYFCC’s lead and nominates Mudbound’s Rachel Morrison for Best Cinematography, Morrison would become the first woman ever nominated in that category. (Really!)
The big winner this year at the NYFCC was Lady Bird, which won Best Film and Best Actress for Saoirse Ronan, who’s emerging as a serious early competitor for this year’s Oscars alongside The Post’s Meryl Streep. (The same could be said for Call Me By Your Name’s Timothee Chalamet, who also collected an acting award at the Gotham Awards on Monday Night.) But while Lady Bird took the top prize, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project also made a strong showing with awards for director Sean Baker and Best Supporting Actor Willem Dafoe, who also won that same award from the NBR on Tuesday. Speaking of people we’d like to see (finally) win an Oscar…
A complete list of winners at the 2017 New York Film Critics Circle Awards is below.
Best Film: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Best First Film: Jordan Peele, Get Out
Best Foreign Language Film: Robin Campillo, BPM (Beats Per Minute)
Best Non-Fiction Film: Agnes Varda, Faces Places
Best Animated Film: Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, Coco
Best Director: Sean Baker, The Florida Project
Best Cinematography: Rachel Morrison, Mudbound
Best Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread
Best Actor: Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name
Best Actress: Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
Best Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
Best Supporting Actress: Tiffany Haddish, Girls Trip
Special Award for Career Achievement: Molly Haskell, critic for Village Voice/New York Magazine