Lady Bird, Girls Trip, Betty Gabriel are 2017 Women Film Critics Circle (WFCC) Winners

Erik Anderson December 22, 2017

The Women Film Critics Circle has chosen Lady Bird as the Best Movie About Women of 2017, also rewarding the film with their Best Movie By a Woman and Best Woman Storyteller screenwriting award.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri won two awards for Frances McDormand’s performance and the doc Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story also won two. Betty Gabriel was recognized with the group’s Invisible Woman Award for her supporting performance in Get Out and Girls Trip won Ensemble. Mudbound won two prizes – The Josephine Baker Award for expressing the women of color experience in America and the Courage in Filmmaking award for director Dee Rees.

The group also acknowledged the activism of Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan and more in the fight against sexual assault, harassment and abuse in the entertainment industry and conversely inducted Harvey Weinstein into their Hall of Shame.

The Women Film Critics Circle is an association of women film critics and scholars from around the country and internationally, who are involved in print, radio, online and TV broadcast media. They came together in 2004 to form the first women critics’ organization in the United States, in the belief that women’s perspectives and voices in film criticism need to be recognized fully.

Here is the full list of nominees and winners (in bold) below.

BEST MOVIE ABOUT WOMEN
A Quiet Passion
Lady Bird
Sophie And The Rising Sun
The Florida Project

BEST MOVIE BY A WOMAN
Detroit
First They Killed My Father
Lady Bird
Mudbound

BEST WOMAN STORYTELLER [Screenwriting Award]
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Maggie Greenwald – Sophie And The Rising Sun
Dee Reese – Mudbound
Angela Workman – The Zookeeper’s Wife

BEST ACTRESS
Sally Hawkins – Maudie
Sally Hawkins – The Shape Of Water
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Cynthia Nixon – A Quiet Passion

BEST ACTOR
Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Denzel Washington – Roman J. Israel, Esq.

BEST YOUNG ACTRESS (Under 21)
Seo-Hyun Ahn – Okja
Mckenna Grace – Gifted
Brooklynn Prince – The Florida Project
Millicent Simmonds – Wonderstruck

BEST COMEDIC ACTRESS
Tiffany Haddish – Girls Trip
Allison Janney – I, Tonya
Margot Robbie – I, Tonya
Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird

BEST FOREIGN FILM BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
A Fantastic Woman
First They Killed My Father
In The Fade
Thelma

*ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD (For a film that most passionately opposes violence against women)
Maudie
The Light Of The Moon
The Rape Of Recy Taylor
Wind River

*JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD (For best expressing the woman of color experience in America)
Girls Trip
Mudbound
Step
The Rape Of Recy Taylor

*KAREN MORLEY AWARD (For best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity)
Battle Of The Sexes
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
Mudbound
The Post

COURAGE IN ACTING (Taking on unconventional roles that radically redefine the images of women on screen)
Sally Hawkins – Maudie
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Michelle Rodriguez – The Assignment
Charlize Theron – Atomic Blonde

COURAGE IN FILMMAKING
Amma Asante – A United Kingdom
Kathryn Bigelow – Detroit
Angelina Jolie – First They Killed My Father
Dee Rees – Mudbound

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN AWARD (Supporting performance by a woman whose exceptional impact on the film dramatically, socially or historically, has been ignored)
Jessica Chastain – The Zookeeper’s Wife
Betty Gabriel – Get Out
Sally Hawkins – Maudie
Cynthia Nixon – A Quiet Passion

BEST DOCUMENTARY BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (tie)
Faces Places
Jane (tie)
Step

WOMEN’S WORK: BEST ENSEMBLE
A Quiet Passion
Girls Trip
Sophie And The Rising Sun
Wonder Woman

BEST FEMALE ACTION HERO
Atomic Blonde
In The Fade
The Shape Of Water
Wonder Woman

BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES
Atomic Blonde
Battle Of The Sexes
Professor Marston And The Wonder Women
Wonder Woman

BEST SCREEN COUPLE
Maudie
Professor Marston And The Wonder Women
The Big Sick
The Shape Of Water

BEST ANIMATED FEMALE(S)
Coco
Loving Vincent
The Breadwinner
Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming

BEST FAMILY FILM
Coco
Beauty And The Beast
The Breadwinner
Wonder

MOMMIE DEAREST WORST SCREEN MOM OF THE YEAR AWARD
Allison Janney – I, Tonya

ACTING AND ACTIVISM AWARD
Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, and all the women who spoke out against the culture of sexual abuse

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Agnes Varda

BEST RISING FEMALE STARS
Izabela Vidovic, Wonder
Peyton Kennedy, American Fable

WFCC HALL OF SHAME
Harvey Weinstein

*ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Adrienne Shelly was a promising actress and filmmaker who was brutally strangled in her apartment in 2006 at the age of forty by a construction worker in the building, after she complained about noise. Her killer tried to cover up his crime by hanging her from a shower20rack in her bathroom, to make it look like a suicide. He later confessed that he was having a “bad day.” Shelly, who left behind a baby daughter, had just completed her film Waitress, which she also starred in, and which was honored at Sundance after her death.

*JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: The daughter of a laundress and a musician, Baker overcame being born black, female and poor, and marriage at age fifteen, to become an internationally acclaimed legendary performer, starring in the films Princess Tam Tam, Moulin Rouge and Zou Zou. She also survived the race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois as a child, and later expatriated to France to escape US racism. After participating heroically in the underground French Resistance during WWII, Baker returned to the US where she was a crusader for racial equality. Her activism led to attacks against her by reporter Walter Winchell who denounced her as a communist, leading her to wage a battle against him. Baker was instrumental in ending segregation in many theaters and clubs, where she refused to perform unless integration was implemented.

*KAREN MORLEY AWARD: Karen Morley was a promising Hollywood star in the 1930s, in such films as Mata Hari and Our Daily Bread. She was driven out of Hollywood for her leftist political convictions by the Blacklist and for refusing to testify against other actors, while Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden were informants against her. And also for daring to have a child and become a mother, unacceptable for female stars in those days. Morley maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.