New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) Awards: Women rule as ‘First Cow’ named Best Film, Chloé Zhao is Best Director

Erik Anderson December 18, 2020

The New York Film Critics Circle announced their 2020 awards today, naming Kelly Reichardt’s ode to the American Frontier, A24’s First Cow, the best film of the year. Chloé Zhao (Searchlight’s Nomadland) picked up her second Best Director win today after Boston last week.

The NYFCC opted to stick with calendar year eligibility instead of the extended Oscar window, knocking out films like Warner Bros’ Judas and the Black Messiah and Paramount’s The United States vs Billie Holiday from contention.

Delroy Lindo’s turn as a MAGA-loving Vietnam veteran in Spike Lee’s Netflix film Da 5 Bloods from early in the summer won his first ever critics award in his 45-year career, taking best actor, and earns him a place in the Oscar conversation. His D5B co-star, the late Chadwick Boseman, surprised with a supporting actor win.

Focus Features’ Never Rarely Sometimes Always picked up two major wins: Best Actress for newcomer Sidney Flanigan and Screenplay for Eliza Hittman. You can read my interview with both Flanigan and Hittman here.

Borat breakthrough Maria Bakalova was named Best Supporting Actress for Amazon’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, in which she made news for catching former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in a compromising position in a hotel room as part of a prank.

Kino Lorber was given a Special Award, for their creation of Kino Marquee, “a virtual cinema distribution service that was designed to help support movie theaters, not destroy them.”

Spike Lee was also given a Special Award for “inspiring the New York community with his short film New York New York and for advocating for a better society through cinema.”

Here is the full list of winners of the 2020 New York Film Critics Circle awards as they are being announced and my predictions from yesterday.

Best Film: First Cow

Best First Film: The Forty-Year Old Version (Radha Blank)

Best Director: Chloé Zhao – Nomadland

Best Actor: Delroy Lindo – Da 5 Bloods

Best Actress: Sidney Flanigan – Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Best Supporting Actor: Chadwick Boseman – Da 5 Bloods

Best Supporting Actress: Maria Bakalova – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Best Screenplay: Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman)

Best Cinematography: Small Axe (Shabier Kirchner for all films)

Best Animated Film: Wolfwalkers

Best Foreign Language Film: Bacurau

Best Non-Fiction Film: Time

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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.