The Latino Entertainment Journalists Association (LEJA) have chosen Parasite as the best film of 2019, also rewarding the South Korean darkly comedic thriller Best Director (Bong Joon Ho), Best Original Screenplay (Bong and Jin Wan Han), Best Film Editing (Jinmo Yang) and International Feature.
1917 was another big winner, sweeping the techs including Production & Set Design, Cinematography, Sound and Score. Little Women took Adapted Screenplay and Knives Out was selected as the Best Ensemble.
The acting prizes took some unique turns from what many critics groups have given us. While they stayed in the Brad Pitt lane for supporting actor, Awkwafina was named best actress for The Farewell.
Puerto Rican-American actress Jennifer Lopez is the recipient of this year’s Rita Moreno Lifetime Achievement Award. Best known for her breakout role as the title character in the 1997 biopic Selena, Lopez has worked on countless films and TV shows in the last 34 years, including Gregory Nava’s My Family,Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sightand on the NBC crime drama Shades of Blue. This year, Lopez made a huge splash in the film Hustlers, a role that earned her a win in the group’s Best Supporting Actress category.
Winning LEJA’s Latino Activism Award this year is Mexican-American actress, producer, director, businesswoman, and activist Eva Longoria. Longoria is best known for her role on eight seasons of the hit ABC TV show Desperate Housewives. This year, she was seen on the big screen in Dora and the Lost City of Gold. Along with her work in Hollywood, Longoria has been active in a number of worthy causes throughout her career, including immigration rights and reform, Latino voting and migrant labor conditions. In 2017, Longoria spearheaded the first “Latinas Who Lunch” meeting that saw Latinas in Hollywood come together on a monthly basis to talk about how to support each other in the industry and create more opportunities for Latinas in TV and film.
This year, LEJA’s Breakout Award goes to Cuban actress Ana de Armas for her lead role in the hit whodunit thriller Knives Out. In the film, de Armas plays Marta Cabrera, the caretaker of a patriarch whose mysterious death points back to many of his family members who had a motive for murder. Before Knives Out, De Armas, who is originally from Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba, starred in such films as War Dogs and Blade Runner 2049.
Founded in 2018, LEJA provides a much-needed opportunity for journalists from the United States to have their works amplified and heard in the areas of film, television, music, theatre, and the arts. Accepting of all backgrounds and identities, LEJA embraces anyone who identifies as Latino, Latina, Latinx, Hispanic, Afro-Latino, Afro-Latina, Latin@, Spanish, or any inclusive and progressive description that champions and accelerates the voices of our culture from around the world.
The full list of winners of the 2019 Latino Entertainment Journalists Association Film Awards are listed below.
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.