For the first time in a very long while, individual critics groups are starting to show a bit of inventiveness in their selections. Perhaps inventiveness isn’t the right word as most of what’s here has been mentioned elsewhere, but certain films seem to be doing better with some groups more than others. For instance, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7 have their best showing so far with the San Diego critics.
Nominations Tallies
(8) Sound of Metal
(7) The Trial of the Chicago 7
(5) First Cow, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Nomadland
(4) Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Mank, Tenet
(3) Black Bear, Minari, On the Rocks, Palm Springs, Pieces of a Woman, Promising Young Woman, The Father
Leave it to the already diverting Columbus critics to honor Promising Young Woman with its top award, recognizing the film’s greatness. Too bad they will likely be the only ones. Everything else was a fairly predictable slate of selections.
Is Minari picking up steam going into the Oscars? It’s not certain, but its late swing through the precursors is certainly giving the film hope.
If you couldn’t see the near-sweep for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, then you weren’t paying attention. The film was beloved by this group, which gave the film a significant number of nominations and then they turned around and followed through. Not that it means much as they are most definitely the outlier.
In spite of a rather pointed protest over Roman Polanski’s Best Directing win, the big winner of the night was not his film An Officer and a Spy, even though it took three awards, it was Best Picture winner Les Misérables, which took five.
In spite of Harriet being among the Oscar nominees, Just Mercy, which was only loosely in the Oscar conversation this year outperformed every other film that had gotten more buzz to take a majority of the prizes.
The Academy gave the award to the composer of Joker. That composer instead won here for Chernobyl. Instead, celebrated composer John Williams took home three prizes for his Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker score. This group was more likely to recognize Williams for his last Star Wars score ever than the Academy was. That said, even when they could have selected Joker, they went with something else. All of the nominees in the Original Score category at the Oscars, except Joker and Marriage Story won a prize here.