Maria Schrader’s She Said has been declared Best Movie About Women by the Women Film Critics Circle. Elsewhere, Sarah Polley’s Women Talking picked up four awards for Best Movie By A Woman, Best Woman Storyteller, the Adrienne Shelly Award for a film that most passionately opposes violence against women, and the Karen Morley Award for best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity.
The Women Film Critics Circle is over 80 entertainment journalists and film scholars that have united to form the first national association of women critics observing and elevating women in film.
Winners in bold below.
BEST MOVIE ABOUT WOMEN
She Said
The Woman King
Till
Women Talking (runner-up)
BEST MOVIE BY A WOMAN
Don’t Worry Darling – Olivia Wilde
Till – Chinonye Chukwu (runner-up)
The Woman King – Gina Prince-Bythewood (runner-up)
Women Talking – Sarah Polley
BEST WOMAN STORYTELLER (Screenwriting Award)
Rebecca Lenkiewicz – She Said (runner-up)
Emma Donoghue – The Wonder
Dana Stevens (and Maria Bello, story) – The Woman King
Sarah Polley – Women Talking
BEST ACTRESS
Vicky Krieps – Corsage
Michelle Yeoh – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Danielle Deadwyler – Till (runner-up)
Cate Blanchett – TAR
BEST ACTOR
Colin Farrell – The Banshees of Inisherin (runner-up)
Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Bill Nighy – Living
Brendan Fraser – The Whale
BEST FOREIGN FILM BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
Corsage (runner-up)
Girl
Happening
Murina
Rickshaw
BEST DOCUMENTARY BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
Aftershock
Gabby Giffords
The Janes
Lucy and Desi (runner-up)
Won’t Back Down
BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (runner-up)
Fire of Love
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande
The Woman King
BEST ANIMATED FEMALE
Izzy Hawthorne – Lightyear (runner-up)
Belle Bottom – Minions: The Rise of Gru
Meilin – Turning Red
BEST SCREEN COUPLE
Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward – Empire of Light
Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Kevin Kline & Sigourney Weaver – The Good House (runner-up)
Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack – Good Luck To You, Leo Grande
BEST TV SERIES
Dead to Me
The Handmaid’s Tale (tie)
Julia
Yellowjackets (tie)
ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD – For a film that most passionately opposes violence against women
ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Adrienne Shelly was a promising actress and filmmaker who was brutally strangled in her apartment in 2006 at the age of forty by a construction worker in the building, after she complained about noise. Her killer tried to cover up his crime by hanging her from a shower rack in her bathroom, to make it look like suicide. He later confessed that he was having a “bad day.” Shelly, who left behind a baby daughter, had just completed her film Waitress, which she also starred in, and which was honored at Sundance after her death.
Don’t Worry Darling
Holy Spider
She Said (runner-up)
Women Talking
JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD – For best expressing the woman of colour experience in America
JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: The daughter of a laundress and a musician, Baker overcame being born black, female and poor, and marriage at age fifteen, to become an internationally acclaimed legendary performer, starring in the films Princess Tam Tam, Moulin Rouge and Zou Zou. She also survived the race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois as a child, and later expatriated to France to escape US racism. After participating heroically in the underground French Resistance during WWII, Baker returned to the US where she was a crusader for racial equality. Her activism led to attacks against her by reporter Walter Winchell who denounced her as a communist, leading her to wage a battle against him. Baker was instrumental in ending segregation in many theaters and clubs, where she refused to perform unless integration was implemented.
Alice
Master
Nanny (runner-up)
Till
KAREN MORLEY AWARD – For best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity
KAREN MORLEY AWARD: Karen Morley was a promising Hollywood star in the 1930s, in such films as Mata Hari and Our Daily Bread. She was driven out of Hollywood for her leftist political convictions by the Blacklist and for refusing to testify against other actors, while Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden were informants against her. And also for daring to have a child and become a mother, unacceptable for female stars in those days. Morley maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.
Alice
The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson
The Woman King (runner-up)
Women Talking
ACTING AND ACTIVISM AWARD
Geena Davis
Frances McDormand
Nichelle Nichols
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Angela Lansbury
Rita Moreno
THE WOMEN FILM CRITICS CIRCLE PAULINE KAEL JURY AWARDS 2022
BEST FEMALE ACTION HERO
Keke Palmer, Alice
BEST DIRECTRESS: COURAGE IN FILMMAKING
Olivia Wilde, Don’t Worry Darling
COURAGE IN ACTING
[Taking on unconventional roles that radically redefine the images of women on screen]
Danielle Deadwyler, Till
Anamaria Vartolomei, Happening
WOMEN’S WORK – BEST ENSEMBLE CAST
The Woman King
THE INVISIBLE WOMAN AWARD
[Supporting performance by a woman whose exceptional impact on the film dramatically, socially or historically, has been ignored]
Charmaine Bingwa, Emancipation
BEST KEPT SECRET – Overlooked Challenging Film Gems
Amitabh Reza Chowdhury, Rickshaw Girl
Nana Mensah, Queen Of Glory
WOMEN SAVING THEMSELVES AWARD
The Janes
MOMMIE DEAREST WORST SCREEN MOM OF THE YEAR
Blonde, Julianne Nicholson as Gladys
HALL OF SHAME
‘Unique, provocative and stylishly opinionated’…Fasten your seat belts!
[Individual WFCC Member Picks]
*The Gotham Awards. For removing the category Best Actress, in the further erasing of women.
*Anatomy Citation. “It doesn’t matter how much I do, I’m still not going to get paid as much as that guy, because of my vagina.” – Jennifer Lawrence speaks out against the continuing literal shortchanging of actresses – regarding Lawrence paid five million dollars less than Leonardo DiCaprio for “Don’t Look Up,” and less than the male cast Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale and Jeremy Renner for “American Hustle.”
*Cringe Citation. Harvey Weinstein’s shameful audiotape recordings. And being reminded of them/him in “She Said.”
*Too Much Information Citation: Emma Thompson, for “Good Luck To You, Leo Grande.”
*Blonde. For depicting only the worst fantasies about Marilyn Monroe, and none of her beauty, grace and intelligence.
*More Blonde. A film that re-exploited Marilyn Monroe and made me feel bad for her. She never had a chance in a man’s world, and this film exploited her again through the unnecessary explicit scenes.
*And More Blonde. An overrated actress romping through the film exposing herself. And why the constant showing of embryos, is it to champion pro-lifers.
*Even More Blonde. Completely inaccurate. The portrayal of the actress is shallow and cliched, and the part of the speaking embryo comes across as a disquieting anti-abortionist statement. My review…
*She Said. A drama about the NY Times investigation into the sex charges against Harvey Weinstein, “She Said” comes off more as a self-congratulatory promo for the NY Times, than emphasis on its victims and intimating a kind of damage control there for its own numerous scandals – the weapons of mass destruction hoax, and most recently calling for the release of Julian Assange – without an apology for the paper’s media participation in orchestrating his incarceration.
*The Cannes Film Festival. For disrespecting credentialed Deadline critic and distinguished WFCC member Valerie Complex, treating her with racist implications as an intruder there. On Being Black At Cannes: How Microaggressions Marred My Festival Experience
* Shame On DOC NYC. For announcing then scrubbing the name off their public list, secretly inviting as guest of honor a cinematographer from the Ukraine Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, Dmytro Kozatsky, who sports Nazi tattoos, and is fond of creating photographs of swastika carved pizzas, while dragging out from the premises a young woman protesting the event.
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