New York Film Critics Online award ‘Minari’ Best Picture; Ellen Burstyn, Youn Yuh-jung tie in Supporting Actress

The New York Film Critics Online (NYFCO) announced their winners for the best in film for 2020 and Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari was named Best Picture. The film also won the group’s Foreign Language Film prize and star Youn Yuh-jung tied with Ellen Burstyn (Pieces of a Woman) for Best Supporting Actress. In their 21st year, this is the third year in a row the NYFCO has chosen a non-English language film as their best picture.

Promising Young Woman had a strong showing with three major wins: Best Actress for Carey Mulligan, plus Best Screenplay and Best Debut Director for Emerald Fennell.

There was a second tie in the announcement as well: Best Breakthrough Performance was shared between Kingsley Ben-Adir for One Night in Miami and Maria Bakalova for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

One surprising outlier was the mention of Abel Ferrera’s Tommaso, a story of an American artist (Willem Dafoe) living in Rome with his young European wife Nikki and their 3-year-old daughter, as a part of the group’s top 10 films.

The eligibility period for films was slightly different than other critics’ awards and the upcoming guilds and Oscars. The NYFCO allowed films from January 1, 2020, to January 31, 2021, making films that did not receive a qualifying release like Cherry, French Exit, Judas and the Black Messiah and The United States vs. Billie Holiday ineligible. Here is the full list of winners. The announcement was first reported by Variety.

Best Picture: Minari (A24)

Best Director: Chloé Zhao, Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)

Best Actor: Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)

Best Actress: Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)

Best Supporting Actor: Leslie Odom Jr, One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios)

Best Supporting Actress: Ellen Burstyn, Pieces of a Woman (Netflix) and Yuh-Jung Youn, Minari (A24) – tie

Best Screenplay: Promising Young Woman (Focus Features) – Emerald Fennell

Best Animated Feature: Soul (Pixar)

Best Cinematography: Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures) – Joshua James Richards

Best Use of Music: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix) – Brandon Marsalis

Best Documentary Feature: The Way I See It (Focus Features)

Best Foreign Language Film: Minari (A24)

Best Debut Director: Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)

Breakthrough Performer: Kingsley Ben-Adir, One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios) and Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Amazon Studios) – tie

Best Ensemble Cast: The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)

Top 10 Films (alphabetical)

The Assistant (Bleecker Street)
First Cow (A24)
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix)
Minari (A24)
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Focus Features)
Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)
One Night in Miami (Amazon Pictures)
Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)
Tommaso (Kino Lorber)
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)

Images courtesy of Netflix, A24

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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), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) 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.

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