New York Film Critics Circle Names ‘Lady Bird’ Best Picture

The New York Film Critics Circle held its annual vote today, announcing the winners in a series of real-time tweets because this is 2017 and if the president can do it so can the rest of us. With a vaguely Hunger Games-esque tweet reading only “The voting has begun #NYFCC” courtesy of Falco Ink., the NYFCC’s public relations agency, the ceremony kicked off.

The critics circle selected Lady Bird as the Best Film of the Year. Its star Saoirse Ronan was voted Best Actress, while Timothee Chalamet was named Best Actor for his performance in Call Me By Your Name. Supporting awards went to Willem Dafoe for The Florida Project (which also received Best Director for Sean Baker) and in a delightful surprise, Tiffany Haddish for Girls Trip, hopefully setting a trend for the rest of the season.

The first award, fittingly the award for Best First Film, went to Jordan Peele and Get Out. Get Out also took the top honors for Best Screenplay and Breakthrough Director as well as the Audience Award at the Gotham Awards this week, so it’s had a big start to awards season.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Phantom Thread won Best Screenplay, an honor it also received from the National Board of Review. Pixar’s Coco was named Best Animated Film. Best Foreign Language Film went to BPM (Beats Per Minute), a French drama about HIV/AIDS activists with ACT UP Paris in the ’90s. Mudbound took Best Cinematography.

Best Nonfiction Film went to Faces Places, directed by Agnès Varda, one of the key figures of the French New Wave film movement. The film follows a friendship forged between the 89-year-old Varda and 33-year-old photographer and muralist JR.