Gotham Nominations: "The Favourite" and "First Reformed" Lead
Thursday, October 18, 2018 at 12:10PM
NATHANIEL R in Best Ensemble, Big Mouth, First Reformed, Gotham Awards, If Beale Street Could Talk, Leave No Trace, Oscars (18), Private Life, Richard E Grant, Support the Girls, The Favourite, Where is Kyra?

by Nathaniel R

It's the first official awards announcement of the season! The Gotham Awards, the East Coast's answer to the Independent Spirit Awards, have announced their nominations with the palace intrigue tragicomedy The Favourite and the existential heavy drama of First Reformed sharing the lead with 3 matching honors each: Best Feature, Best Screenplay, and one acting citation (a special ensemble prize for the former and Ethan Hawke for the latter). One assumes that they'd have both been nominated for director, too, but one of the quirks of Gotham is that they don't have a Director category, only a category for brand new directors and we love the nominees there, especially Bo Burnham for Eighth Grade and Ari Aster for Hereditary. 

Other films receiving much needed good news since they were released before the fall glut and needed awards bodies to be reminded of them over the next few months: Leave No Trace, The Wife, Sorry to Bother You, and The Rider. The complete nominations and a few more comments after the jump...

Best Feature 

The Gotham Awards almost always have two future Best Picture nominees on their list so this is great news for If Beale Street Could Talk which seems to be one of the 'cusp' films that might or might not at the Oscars. (The most Oscar correlation they've ever had in the current Best Picture era was in 2014 when Birdman, Boyhood and Budapest Hotel all repeated their nominations at the Oscars and Birdman repeated its win, too. The least they've had was in 2012 when none of their nominees went on to Best Picture citations with AMPAS)

 

Best Documentary

 

Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award

 

Best Screenplay

Very disappointed not to see Eighth Grade on this particular list.

 

Best Actor
They don't have supporting categories at the Gothams so it's fun to see both Driver and Grant, who we assume our threats for Supporting Actor at the Oscars, both in the mix. 

 

Best Actress


What a choice list. Pleasantly surprised to see our beloved Pfeiffer in the list (though surely it cost Melissa McCarthy -- as you'll note that her co-star made it over in best actor) and of course this is very good news for Toni Colette. I haven't yet seen Support the Girls but it's a thrill to see Regina Hall honored somewhere since she's so underappreciated. Though some of the peculiarities and inconsistencies of support at the Gotham Awards are due to the fact that it's a juried nomination system (the committee includes film critics, festival programmers, and film curators and so on) so generally you get more electic shortlists that way.

 

Special Jury Award For Ensemble Performance

Usually I object to ensemble prizes for very small casts but this film is special in this regard so I applaud the choice. I hope it's also nominated for SAG when the list will be wider and include Joe Alwyn and especially Nicholas Hoult, who are also justright in the film.

 

Breakthrough Actor


Fans of Leave No Trace will be very happy about the Harcourt nomination which was not a given. It's another reminder to me that I really must catch up with this movie.

 

Breakthrough Series – Long Form
I honestly can't express how much I love Big Mouth. My favorite characters are Missy (Jenny Slate) and Hormone Monstress (Maya Rudolph) but really it's all wonderful. 

 

Breakthrough Series – Short Form
Since we haven't yet heard of any of these -- we're terrible at keeping up with webseries -- here are links where you can watch them if you so choose!

 

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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