Keke Palmer, ‘RRR’ Get Huge Oscar Boosts From New York Critics Awards

Several scrappy Oscar hopefuls received major visibility boosts with Friday’s announcement of the New York Film Critics Circle winners, the first critics’ group to weigh in with their selections for the favorites of the year. Keke Palmer, explosively good and charismatic in Jordan Peele’s Nope, pulled off a glorious upset by taking best supporting actress, a vital kick start to receiving larger recognition down the road in a messy, overcrowded category. (You might compare it to another breakout first-timer winning NYFCC, the Borat sequel’s Maria Bakalova, who went on to an Oscar nod.) And S.S. Rajamouli, the man behind the action epic RRR, overtook a slew of big names in the directing field, crucial as that audience hit attempts to mount a campaign after India chose not to submit it for best international feature.

But it was Tár, Todd Field’s beloved portrait of a revered conductor, which dominated, winning best picture and actress for star Cate Blanchett, the clear front-runner at this stage of the latter category. 

Elsewhere, NYFCC recognized a few heavy hitters already appearing a little more unstoppable by the day. They include Martin McDonagh, taking screenplay for The Banshees of Inisherin, and Ke Huy Quan, universe-hopping patriarch of Everything Everywhere All at Once (who also picked up a Gotham Award this week), winning best supporting actor. The former Indiana Jones child star is riding a heartfelt comeback narrative while representing one of the year’s biggest overall contenders. Rivals including Banshees’ Brendan Gleeson and The Fabelmans’ Judd Hirsch will need to act quickly to dent Quan’s momentum.

Meanwhile, one of the cinematography race’s strongest contenders, Top Gun: Maverick’s Claudio Miranda, prevailed over fellow Oscar winners in The Fabelmans’ Janusz Kamiński and Empire of Light’s Roger Deakins (Miranda won the Oscar for Life of Pi), while Colin Farrell made a significant leap in the best-actor race, cited for both his contender The Banshees of Inisherin and spring sci-fi hit After Yang. 

The documentary race, when it comes to the Academy, will open up to more populist choices that critics aren’t as drawn to—remember My Octopus Teacher?—but for now there’s little reason to see any film but Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed as the one to beat, at least among precursor groups. The incendiary Nan Goldin portrait, exploring her artistry as well as her explosive activist campaign against the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, wins with NYFCC to kick off what will surely be a healthy prize run in the months ahead.

It can be hard to assess the impact of a group like NYFCC on the race as a whole. Last year, voters went for Lady Gaga in the best-actress race, a seeming huge boon to her House of Gucci campaign, but the Academy dismissed that film to such an extent that even she was left off of the nominations list in one of the year’s biggest snubs. Yet that same year, NYFCC also named Drive My Car the best film of the year—at that point, a fairly unknown Japanese film, but thereafter, the toast of film critics around the US (it’d later win with Los Angeles and the National Society of Film Critics) and an inspired best-picture Oscar nominee. You can draw a straight line to that from its NYFCC win.

So what does this mean for Tár? NYFCC’s top choices tend to at least be nominated for best picture—La La Land, Boyhood, Lady Bird, Roma, among recent examples—though there are exceptions, from Carol to 2020’s First Cow. In this demanding but brilliant movie’s case, it’s proof that it will be a force to be reckoned with as the season revs up.

Full list of winners:

• Best Picture: Tár (dir. Todd Field)
• Best Director: S.S. Rajamouli, RRR
• Best Actor: Colin Farrell, After Yang and The Banshees of Inisherin
• Best Actress: Cate Blanchett, Tár 
• Best Supporting Actor: Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Best Supporting Actress: Keke Palmer, Nope
• Best Screenplay: Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin
• Best Cinematography: Claudio Miranda, Top Gun: Maverick
• Best International Film: EO (dir. Jerzy Skolimowski)
• Best Non-Fiction Film: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (dir. Laura Poitras)
• Best Animated Film: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (dir. Dean Fleischer Camp)
• Best First Film: Aftersun (dir. Charlotte Wells)