The Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. convened on Sunday in Rancho Park for its annual year-end voting meeting, at which the group chose and announced its winners. Those included Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-honored “Anora,” which took the award for best picture and saw two of its actors cited: Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov. Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” won the group’s prize for film not in the English language.
Times film staffers Mark Olsen and Amy Nicholson participated in Sunday’s voting (Nicholson by proxy), along with several of the paper’s freelance contributors: Robert Abele, Carlos Aguilar, Tim Grierson, Michael Ordoña and Katie Walsh. Times film editor Joshua Rothkopf and columnist Glenn Whipp, both of whom voted in LAFCA’s awards, discussed the results afterward.
GLENN WHIPP: Josh, when you asked me to create a file for this story before the weekend, I put a placeholder headline atop it: “Los Angeles Film Critics give ‘Anora’ best picture.” And, lo and behold, we did just that, checking off an item that has been on my to-do list for the past seven years, ever since Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” lost our best picture prize by one vote to “Call Me by Your Name.” I am thrilled that we’ve finally given an honor to Baker, particularly for “Anora,” a movie that seamlessly shifts between comedy and tragedy, attuned to class and privilege, existing on the edges of an America rarely captured on film.
“Anora” also took two of our acting citations, with star Mikey Madison sharing lead performance honors with Marianne Jean-Baptiste from Mike Leigh’s piercing drama “Hard Truths,” while Yura Borisov won supporting performance alongside Kieran Culkin from Jesse Eisenberg‘s odd-couple road movie “A Real Pain.”
Madison and Borisov share a palpable chemistry from the moment they set eyes on each other in “Anora,” though you could hardly call it a “meet cute.” They’re introduced during a home invasion, with Borisov, a brooding Russian, brought in as the muscle to convince Madison’s sex worker to annul her marriage to the son of a Russian oligarch. Their relationship deepens over the course of the film, culminating in a final scene that ends their story with a melancholy ambivalence.
What did you make of our acting winners, Josh? I love how the four lead performers we cited — two winners, two runners-up — were women, while the four supporting actors were men. (The group went to gender-neutral categories in acting in 2022.) It could be read as a reflection of the depth of both the lead actress and supporting actor categories this year. It might also be, as my friend, critic Christy Lemire joked, indicative of how “women are the ones that get s— done, and men are secondary.” I have a feeling Jean-Baptiste’s perpetually aggrieved Pansy in “Hard Truths” would have a thought or two on the subject.
JOSHUA ROTHKOPF: I like Christy’s read. It was a year of extraordinary performances by women, dominant and electrifying, and those would also include our two runners-up, Fernanda Torres in “I’m Still Here” and, my personal favorite of the bunch, Demi Moore, vulnerable and furious in “The Substance.” Part of the freedom of shifting to gender-neutral acting categories is that we don’t have to limit ourselves when the group would clearly like to celebrate more than one woman. Indeed, all four of these performances should be in the Oscars conversation.
I suppose there may be a year in which four men will be selected in the lead category; that hasn’t happened yet, and honestly, given LAFCA’s size (roughly 50 voters) and tastes, I doubt it ever will. But if it does, I hope those future nominees carry the same significance as the slate we honored today. For the first time in our nearly 50-year history, a Black actress won our lead performance category — for an exceptionally demanding turn that only someone of Jean-Baptiste’s caliber could pull off. We found room to hail Madison’s brassy breakthrough in “Anora,” while also nodding to the Brazilian veteran Torres and Moore, a Hollywood icon only now doing her best work.
To my eyes, there’s a value when our group takes on a “corrective” approach — I use scare quotes because that word is insufficient for what we’re really doing in this case, which is a deeper dive into the richness of acting. The most exciting moment of the day’s voting (did I hear a few woos in the room?) was when we selected Iran’s Mohammad Rasoulof for the directing award for his work on “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” Rasoulof, as has been widely reported, filmed his movie in secret and then had to flee his home country to avoid a prison sentence. (He still manages to be self-deprecating in interviews.) What did you think about that choice? Did it strike you as a swerve from expectations? Is there a benefit to doing that? When LAFCA assembles, what should our goal be?
WHIPP: It’s natural, Josh, to want to make a statement with choices on occasion, and I’m OK with that impulse as long as the art merits the selection. I voted for Baker, Payal Kapadia (“All We Imagine as Light”) and Coralie Fargeat (“The Substance”) for director, but I really liked “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” a movie that, like so many of the year’s best films, is hard to pin down. It’s an urgent political thriller, a blunt domestic drama and a document of state brutality. I’m glad we honored Rasoulof, a first for an Iranian filmmaker, something that greats like Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi never managed to pull off.
Our documentary winner, the haunting “No Other Land,” a look at the devastating costs of displacement in the southern West Bank, could also be seen as a corrective. The movie has won numerous honors, starting with its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February and including prizes this week from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Gotham Awards. Yet it still doesn’t have a U.S. distributor. Can these honors — and, one expects, recognition at the Oscars — spur a company to climb on board? I hope so. I haven’t stopped thinking about “No Other Land” and the persistence of the people seen in the film since watching it.
Our emphatic selection of Jean-Baptiste can be seen as a statement, too. Coming after the win with the New York critics and what I’d guess will be an honor from the National Society of Film Critics next month, this feels analogous to “Drive My Car” sweeping these groups on its way to a surprise best picture Oscar nomination in 2022. “Hard Truths” won’t open in L.A. until January, but the wins establish it as required viewing. The lead actress race is crowded. These awards, combined with the depths of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, will help to firmly elbow her into the conversation.
ROTHKOPF: There is, as you indicate, a kind of momentum that can build for an edgier performance or title out of the critics’ groups. It’s why critics should never be counted out when it comes to the Oscar race. A movie like “Drive My Car” — which ended up receiving four Academy Award nominations and one win — would never have been discovered by AMPAS voters on their own without the steady enthusiasm of reviewers and awards-granting bodies.
Though it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, Los Angeles often likes to go its own way after the New York group announces its top film. LAFCA opting for “Anora” following New York’s choice of “The Brutalist” as its best film would seem to follow suit here. More to the point, we’re in for a ride during the coming months: There’s no “The Zone of Interest” or “Tár” set to sweep the table — even though the witches of “Wicked” (pretty much a non-factor at LAFCA) should be sweeping in on their own brooms any moment now. Are these critics’ picks going to feel out of touch as the season develops?
WHIPP: There are always going to be some people who ask, “What is this movie?” I remember a world leader doing just that the year “Parasite” became the first non-English-language film to win best picture. But I prefer to hang with the crowd that might express some curiosity and inquire instead, “Where can I find this movie?” Our animated feature winner, “Flow,” a delightful film about a group of animals working together in a post-apocalyptic world, comes from Latvia and is now playing in a few hundred theaters. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, a “Homeward Bound” for these modern times. Everyone I’ve talked with who has seen it has been deeply moved by it. So, no, critics aren’t out of touch, Josh. We like a good cry, too!
