Fittingly for a year of cinema about dissidents and revolutionaries, Oscar season kicked off in earnest with Monday night’s Gotham Awards, an awards ceremony at war with itself.
The Gothams have always prided themselves on being the starting gun for awards season, but in recent years, an event created to spotlight independent film has leaned further into its status as an essential stop on the Oscars pole dance. Two years ago, the Gothams removed their budget cap, allowing films that cost over $35 million to compete for the first time. Tribute awards that used to go to obscure-but-beloved figures in the New York indie scene now go to blockbusters like Sinners and second-tier studio contenders like After the Hunt and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. This tension between Old Gothams and New Gothams revealed itself in offhand moments, as when Sinners’s Delroy Lindo went off script mid-tribute to insist that his director, Ryan Coogler, was “an independent filmmaker at heart.”
But while the Gothams’ organizers seemingly aspire to become the East Coast’s version of the Critics’ Choice Awards, the awards themselves are still determined by small panels of insiders, and many of them haven’t gotten the memo. Hence the strange disconnect at the December 1 ceremony. The dining room at Cipriani Wall Street was absolutely jam-packed with A-listers. Jennifer Lawrence was there, nominated for Die, My Love. Rihanna was there, supporting Breakthrough Performer nominee A$AP Rocky. Oscar hopefuls like Jacob Elordi, Teyana Taylor, Amanda Seyfried, and Stellan Skarsgård were there — all hoping to use a Gotham win as a springboard for future podium moments to come.
None of them won. Instead, the Gotham juries gravitated, as they often do, to the tiniest films in the race. The knock-on effect was that all three of the night’s acting winners — Sope Dirisu of the British/Nigerian film My Father’s Shadow, Wunmi Mosaku of Sinners, and Guinean newcomer Abou Sangaré of the French film Souleymane’s Story — were not there to accept their awards. The normal logic of awards season that says the bigger you are, the less you attend was flipped. The stars showed up but didn’t win; the people who did win couldn’t show up, because they are working actors who for the most part don’t have expensive campaigns behind them. If you throw an awards show with no winners, does it make a sound?
Thus, it was all the more notable that the night’s biggest winner was a man who actually was there in the room. On one hand, it was not a good day to be Jafar Panahi: The Palme d’Or winner had just been sentenced in absentia to a year in prison by Iran’s Revolutionary Tribunal. But at the Gothams, he went three for three, winning Best International Feature, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Director for It Was Just an Accident. As Puck’s Matt Belloni noted, the news of Panahi’s sentence had been leaked by his own lawyer earlier that day: “It’s almost like Neon, which is behind Panahi’s Oscar campaign, timed that announcement perfectly.” Panahi’s speeches were the night’s most anticipated moments, though he refrained from addressing the sentence directly, instead dedicating his first prize to the Iranian filmmakers who work in secret. Still, the rapt response to his victories seems to indicate that It Was Just an Accident has probably surpassed its Neon stablemate Sentimental Value as the International Oscar front-runner. Panahi himself must be considered a serious contender in Director and Original Screenplay, as well.
Another contender who raised their stock was not a winner, but a presenter, as Supporting Actor hopeful Adam Sandler turned in a charming appearance while presenting a tribute to his Jay Kelly director, Noah Baumbach, the highlight of which was an extended runner about firing his agent after not getting the Billy Baldwin part in The Squid and the Whale. “Can we have an awards ceremony where Adam Sandler gets every award?” his fellow Netflix contender Joel Edgerton joked afterward. As long as there are precursor ceremonies in need of someone to be incredibly funny in three-minute increments, Sandler should not be counted out.
Ultimately, in the night’s battle between Old Gothams and New Gothams, it was the New Gothams that emerged triumphant. Last year, the Best Feature prize went to a totally out-of-nowhere pick: the dark dramedy A Different Man. This year, normal service resumed. A jury that included Academy president Janet Yang awarded the trophy to One Battle After Another, in all likelihood beginning a coronation that will continue until March 15. This is how the Gothams want it to be.
