In my second year as a member of the NSFC, we met this morning at Elinor Bunim in Lincoln Center and voted on this year’s films. These things can be pretty grueling – and today was no different – just so many rounds of voting and tallying, with critics in New York, and zooming in from Los Angeles, and other places. Our chairman, Justin Chang, 2024 Pulitzer Price winner! – kept us on track, and did an amazing job wrangling all the votes in. It was good to see friends! I could have Zoomed in but decided to go so I could sit next to Farran and gossip in between voting rounds. It’s a numbers game. And unlike the NYFCC, the NSFC releases the runners-up, as well as the point spread on all of these. You can see how close these races were. We vote with numbered ballots, with stacked values and then tally it up. It can go long if we don’t have a winner in the first round. I also love that we award best experimental film – fun! – as well as a special citation for a film still awaiting U.S. distribution. There are also the Film Heritage Awards, which we give out every year, to individuals or organizations doing good work we want to acknowledge. This year we gave out three.
BEST PICTURE
“Nickel Boys” (47 points)
Runners-up: “Anora,” “All We Imagine as Light” (34 points)
BEST DIRECTOR
Payal Kapadia, “All We Imagine as Light” (49 points)
Runners-up: RaMell Ross, “Nickel Boys” (42 points), Sean Baker, “Anora” (33 points)
BEST ACTRESS
Marianne Jean-Baptiste, “Hard Truths” (79 points)
Runners-up: Mikey Madison, “Anora” (35 points), Ilinca Manolache, “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” (32 points)
BEST ACTOR
Colman Domingo, “Sing Sing” (60 points)
Runners-up: Adrien Brody, “The Brutalist” (51 points), Ralph Fiennes, “Conclave” (45 points)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Michele Austin, “Hard Truths” (55 points)
Runners-up (tie)L Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, “Nickel Boys,” and Natasha Lyonne, “His Three Daughters” (39 points)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Kieran Culkin, “A Real Pain” (52 points)
Runners-up: (tie) Guy Pearce, “The Brutalist,” and Edward Norton, “A Complete Unknown “(50 points); Adam Pearson, “A Different Man” (41 points)
BEST SCREENPLAY
Jesse Eisenberg, “A Real Pain” (47 points)
Runners-up: Radu Jude, “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” (46 points), Sean Baker, “Anora” (45 points)
BEST FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
“All We Imagine as Light” (44 points)
Runners-up: “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” (41 points), “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (28 points)
BEST NONFICTION FILM
“No Other Land” (70 points)
Runners-up: “Dahomey” (50 points), “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” (24 points)
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Jomo Fray, “Nickel Boys” (80 points)
Runners-up: Lol Crawley, “The Brutalist” (38 points), Jarin Blaschke, “Nosferatu” (21 points)
SPECIAL CITATION FOR A FILM AWAITING U.S. DISTRIBUTION
“No Other Land”
BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM
“The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire”
FILM HERITAGE AWARDS
To Save and Project: The MoMa International Festival of Film Preservation, for more than two decades of superb restorations and diverse programming from all over the world, in collaboration with archives, foundations, studios and other organizations.
IndieCollect, which, since its founding in 2010 by Sandra Schulberg, has met the challenge of preserving independent films with a rare sense of artistic responsibility.
Scott Eyman, for his outstanding books on film artists and epochal shifts in moviemaking, most recently with “Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided,” a revelatory study of the nexus of American politics and American pop culture.
I’ve reviewed and/or written about a couple of these.
All We Imagine as Light
No Other Land
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
And some of these I wrote about in my 2024 Film Roundup on Liberties.
