Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari leads the nominations for the 2020 Seattle Film Critics Society Awards, honoring the year’s best in film with 8 nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Steven Yeun), Best Supporting Actress (Yuh-jung Youn), Best Ensemble Cast, Best Original Score, and Best Youth Performance (Alan Kim). The Korean-American film also scored a Best Film Not in the English Language nomination.
AARP The Magazine announced the nominees for the upcoming Movies for Grownups® Awards, with Minari, Nomadland, and One Night in Miami, among the films contending for the Best Picture/Best Movie for Grownups category.
Netflix’s “Mank,” leads the film nominations for the 26th annual Critics Choice Awards with an impressive 12 nominations including Best Picture. “Minari” (A24) followed closely behind with 10 nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor for Steven Yeun, Best Supporting Actress for Yuh-Jung Youn, Best Young Actor/Actress for Alan Kim, Best Acting Ensemble, Best Director for Lee Isaac Chung, Best Original Screenplay for Lee Isaac Chung, Best Cinematography for Lachlan Milne, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Score for Emile Mosseri.
The Palm Springs International Film Awards announced that Viola Davis is the recipient of the Desert Palm Achievement Award, Actress for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Berlinale revealed the 15 films including seven world premieres and six debuts for the Generation program in the two competitions Kplus and 14plus.
Nomadland was a hit with the Toronto Film Critics Association, taking three top awards at the organization’s annual vote. Nomadland was awarded Best Picture, Best Director for Chloé Zhao, and Best Actress for Frances McDormand.
The Washington, D.C. Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA) announced their top honorees for 2020 with Nomadland taking five wins including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress for Frances McDormand, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography.
For the Retrospective of the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival, the festival will showcase a program of 27 comedies featuring three different American actresses under the title “No Angels – Mae West, Rosalind Russell & Carole Lombard”. The films were chosen with a focus on the strict morality rules of the Motion Picture Production Code, which were increasingly enforced after 1934. Officially adopted in 1930 and dubbed the “Hays Code”, it was a voluntary system by which the Hollywood Studios agreed to uphold moral standards in filmmaking to avoid the censors’ knife. But the Hays Office soon became an even stricter arbiter than the actual censorship office of what could and couldn’t be shown on screen. The code prohibited explicit depictions of sex and promiscuity, as well as the use of profanity. Yet during that period, these three women succeeded in shaping their own film roles, finding their own style, and subtly subverting the Hays Code rules.
Southern India-set Pebbles by Vinothraj P.S won the Tiger Award, while I Comete – A Corsican Summer by French filmmaker Pascal Tagnati and Looking for Venera by Norika Sefa from Kosovo both won Special Jury Awards at the expanded 50th anniversary edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The VPRO Big Screen Award went to El perro que no calla by Ana Katz from Argentina and Quo Vadis, Aida? by Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Žbanić won the BankGiro Loterij Audience Award.
Nomadland won three top honors including Film of the Year, at the 41st London Critics’ Circle Film Awards, which were held in a virtual ceremony on Sunday night. The film’s lead Frances McDormand was named Actress of the Year, while writer-director Chloé Zhao won Screenwriter of the Year.
Completely virtual for the first time, the 24th edition of New York International Children’s Film Festival (NYICFF) will open on March 5th with a premiere event for Elizabeth Ito’s new Netflix animated series City of Ghosts. The animated feature Nahuel and the Magic Book, directed by Germán Acuña, will make its North American premiere on March 6th as the 2021 Opening Spotlight program, and the Festival will conclude with a Closing Spotlight screening of Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon with an exclusive, live conversation with the film’s directors Don Hall and Carlos López-Estrada and appearances by lead voice cast member Kelly Marie Tran.
The world premiere of Corey McLean’s Havana Libre, documenting the fight to legitimize surfing in Cuba will open the 2021 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula. The festival will close with Ann Kaneko’s Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust, a documentary on a fresh interpretation of the Japanese American confinement site by examining the environmental and political history behind the World War II camp.