Our weekly awards-season digest finds the Kneecap boys thanking the Letterboxd community, Katy O’Brian getting very big, Marianne Jean-Baptiste praising independent filmmaking and more.
It is with a slightly foggy brain that I address you this week: I am writing this the morning after the British Independent Film Awards, which took place Sunday night at London’s iconic music venue Roundhouse, meaning I have now seen Olivia Colman and Caroline Polachek on the same stage almost exactly three years apart. The ceremony, at which we were served fish (and chip) curry and treated to a DJ set from Kelly Lee Owens, marked the first major night of awards season in the UK; below, we’ll look at Kneecap’s sweep and another win for Hard Truths’ Marianne Jean-Baptiste, along with a dive into the Golden Globe nominations.
Let’s start with the end of the BIFAs. Kneecap was the unsurprising winner of the night, taking home the top honor of Best British Independent Film (to some of the loudest cheers in the room), along with six other trophies. Accepting the award, director Rich Peppiatt appreciated the “irony in the best British film being Irish,” while band member Naoise Ó Cairealláin paid tribute to “Indigenous and Native cultures all around the world” and voiced the band’s support for Palestinian solidarity.
Kneecap’s seven BIFAs also include Best Debut Screenplay for Peppiatt and Best Joint Lead Performance for band members and acting newcomers Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin and JJ Ó Dochartaigh, who stopped by the red carpet to thank the Letterboxd community, who has “genuinely f—cking really supported the film from the start.” They also shared their favorite films of the year (The Substance for Liam, Small Things Like These for Naoise), and toasted the Letterboxd microphone.
The great Marianne Jean-Baptiste followed her NYFCC and LAFCA wins with the BIFA for Best Lead Performance in Hard Truths; as she walked up to the stage, she was embraced by The Outrun’s Saoirse Ronan, almost certainly that category’s runner-up. Jean-Baptiste told us on the red carpet about working with Mike Leigh, and the importance of BIFA; she said the work of filmmakers “is better served when they’re independent, and don’t have people interfering, telling them who they should cast, messing about with the script. It’s really important to celebrate it.” Her co-star Michele Austin added: “[Hard Truths] is a very particular portrait of British life, of Black British life, which we don’t see on the big screen—I am thrilled that we’re here and that we are able to push people towards seeing our film.”
Cannes breakout On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (out in UK theaters this week, in the US next March) won Best Director for Rungano Nyoni and Breakthrough Performance for revelatory newcomer Susan Chardy, while Anora won Best International Independent Film. We also caught up with director (and Letterboxd member) Sean Baker and producers Samantha Quan and Alex Coco on the red carpet about Ani’s juul, Baker’s trademark poster typeface and his adoration of Britpop. (Trigger warning: in the clip, I wildly, erroneously label British pop band Take That as Britpop. I apologize to all Britpop fans, but I don’t apologize for giving Baker a platform to rave about Ride and Oasis.)
Lastly on the BIFAs: the Richard Harris Award, which recognizes an outstanding contribution to British film, went to the legendary Sophie Okonedo, who gave a touching speech about how roles for women of color were limited when she first graduated drama school (alongside Marianne Jean-Baptiste) but that working in the theater taught her invaluable lessons for working in independent film, such as “the importance of being part of the company [and] not to take myself too seriously.” Allie has collected the full list of BIFA winners, including more great indies like Bring Them Down, Santosh and Grand Theft Hamlet to add to your watchlists.
While the BIFAs went wild for Kneecap, across the pond, the Independent Spirit Awards honored Anora and I Saw the TV Glow with four nominations each, and highlighted a number of fantastic smaller indie performances, among them Ryan Destiny (The Fire Inside), June Squibb (Thelma) and Joan Chen (Dìdi (弟弟)). It’s fantastic to see I Saw the TV Glow gain some traction this season, with a supporting nod for Brigette Lundy-Paine and directing and writing nominations for Jane Schoenbrun; Letterboxd interviewed Smith and Lundy-Paine about their characters’ physicality and cultural touchstones back in May, and Schoenbrun’s immaculate four faves are always worth revisiting.
Onto the Golden Globes, which has given a major boost to Emilia Pérez with ten nominations. The Brutalist picked up seven, with individual nods for Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and director Brady Corbet, while Conclave, Anora and The Substance also fared well (we heard from Demi Moore at the Gotham Awards on how The Substance captures the violent cycle of “compare and despair”). Once again, the Golden Globes’ split musical/comedy and drama categories means many awards-season underdogs get their flowers, such as Daniel Craig for Queer, Tilda Swinton for The Room Next Door and Fernanda Torres for I’m Still Here, each among my favorite performances this year. I’m Still Here’s average rating is still through the roof, currently sitting at a 4.4(!), and Almodóvar fans are in for a treat when The Room Next Door hits US cinemas on December 20.
Challengers has also officially entered awards season, with Globes nominations for Zendaya and for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ hyper-addictive score, while Sebastian Stan’s incredible year has landed him double nominations for A Different Man and The Apprentice, in two different acting categories. However, the Globes continues to confuse as much as delight: Heretic is apparently a comedy (what is comedic, though, is Hugh Grant’s pithy assessment of his character as someone who “was not invited to parties,” in his interview with Letterboxd’s Mia Lee Vicino). No Danielle Deadwyler for The Piano Lesson is just one of many glaring omissions; you can catch up on our interview with Deadwyler and her co-stars on YouTube.
Final note: the Globes was one of the few places I was hoping to see a vote of confidence for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which is, in my opinion, an absolute screaming masterpiece, especially when you hear from the master George Miller himself on how he shot those unparalleled action sequences. Alas, I raise my glass to the National Board of Review, who last week named Furiosa as one of the ten best films of the year.
Note: Spoilers for Love Lies Bleeding follow.
Along with its twelve BIFA nominations (and a win for Best Cinematography), the great John Waters just named Love Lies Bleeding as his top film for 2024 in Vulture. The director called Rose Glass’s sophomore feature one that “Russ Meyer might have made if he had been a lesbian intellectual addicted to steroids,” an apt summary for a movie that ends with Katy O’Brian getting so jacked that she becomes a literal giantess and nearly crushes Ed Harris into the ground. As PepeWizzard writes, “Give me more giant women helping their girlfriend take down their despicable Dad.”
On the BIFA red carpet, star Katy O’Brian told us how that moment came together. “I had no idea if it was gonna work out—so much of VFX now doesn’t pass very well, it looks fake,” she says. “I was, honestly, with our budget, shocked at how well it turned out. Especially considering I was by myself in an all-white room, with a Ken doll as Ed Harris, just pretending that he’s moving around. I was blown away that it worked. It also helped that I was working out so much and felt really huge.”
Glass and her co-writer Weronika Tofilska put that moment in the script for fun, “and then it was like, right, now we have to actually do it, oh f—k,” the director says. “It was fun and weird. It was the first time I had to do any stuff with green screen, and actors reacting to tennis balls.”
Producer Andrea Cornwell has a slight correction, however: Harris’ stand-in was an Action Man, not a Ken doll. The giantess was “a mixture of actual Katy, and a lighting stand where someone had drawn her face on it, which was about 30 feet high,” she reveals. That’s how you use movie magic to create a film, as Eli writes, that “dares to imagine how it might feel to be picked up and carried away from all your problems by a giant, strong woman.”
Awards season is already overwhelmingly busy, so I’ll briefly account for other awards from last week before looking ahead, starting with the European Film Awards, at which Emilia Perez took Film, Director, Screenwriter and Actress. Matt’s rounded up the winners, including some inspired picks from the year’s best international cinema such as Souleymane’s Story, Armand and Bye Bye Tiberias. The LA Film Critics Association also announced its 50th annual selections, crowning Anora as its top film while honoring The Seed of the Sacred Fig director Mohammad Rasoulof with Best Director. Matt, awards legend, has the full list of winners.
This week is a big one for voters, with Oscars voting for shortlist categories closing as Golden Globes final round voting opens tomorrow. Next Monday, three major guilds—SAG, DGA and WGA—open their voting, and on Tuesday we’ll get the Oscars shortlists for ten categories including documentary and international film, while Critics Choice Award nominations drop tomorrow.
To celebrate Kneecap’s BIFA sweep, I’ve gathered several lists of Irish-language cinema, highlighting the likes of The Quiet Girl and The Wind that Shakes the Barley. BIFA’s HQ also has a complete collection of Sophie Okonedo roles, including her scene-stealing part in this year’s Janet Planet. To follow Marianne Jean-Baptiste telling us about the secret to her lasting collaboration with Mike Leigh (“trust, a shared sense of humor”), take a look at Travis Lytle’s list of 25 Favorite Actor-Director Collaborations, celebrating the likes of Tony Leung/Wong Kar-wai and Liv Ullman/Ingmar Bergman. And with that, I’m off to collaborate with my housemate on what we want to watch tonight; I showed her Beats last week (one of my four faves), and she loved it—which I think we can all agree is probably the best feeling in the world.
Voters and awards bodies decide how awards season ends, but the conversation starts on Letterboxd. Here’s this week’s crop of the best reviews of 2024 awards season films. If you’d like to be featured here, tag your reviews best in show for consideration.
Ben on On Becoming a Guinea Fowl:
“The craftsmanship on display here as a whole is absolutely impeccable. Razor-sharp editing that holds when appropriate but holds no mercy, great use of an electronic and tense score, flawless soundwork, great use of location and sets, strong hair and makeup, amazing wardrobe... this film fires on all counts. And at the centre is that screenplay, that slow spiral into tragedy, that series of emotional shifts, that tale so devastatingly honest.”
“If there are two things that anyone takes away from this film, it will be a respect for the Irish way of life and a (possibly newfound) love for the music of Kneecap. I love Ireland, it’s my home; I love Irish, it’s my language; a nation without a language is a nation without a soul, and I hope that Kneecap helps keep both alive so that I can see my way of living projected onto the biggest screen in my county again very soon.”
“A quiet and suffocating tale of regret, remorse, rage and unforgivable guilt. I liked the Rashomon structure to this a lot, especially on Barry’s side when they spoke Irish around him and we as the audience had no subtitles to understand. Christopher Abbott yet again proves his mettle as an emotionally complex leading man. Just a really smart, lean and horrifying tale of one-upping perceived personal slights that snowball into something so much more sinister.”
