Franglais27 Tales

The WFCC Awards place an emphasis each year on highlighting the creativity of women within the film industry. This year’s award winners reflect the consensus of opinions surrounding films for this awards season such as Sinners, One Battle After Another, Hamnet and others following an intense year on the festival circuit with very strong awards contenders emerging.

However, it was Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You that was voted as the Best Film about Women with Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet being awarded the prize of Best Film by a Woman.

Hamnet has picked up three awards in total including one for Jessie Buckley as Best Actress and is matched by Sinners equally picking up three awards including Best Screen Couple for Wunmi Mosaku and Michael B. Jordan.

Other winners include recognition for Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby acknowledging its central themes opposing violence against women and a nod for KPop Demon Hunters within the animation category.

The Women Film Critics Circle (‘WFCC’) was founded in 2004 as the United States’ first all women critics’ guild.

The full list of WFCC Awards winners and runners up are indicated in bold below.

Best Movie About Women

Winner: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Runner Up: Hamnet

Eleanor the Great

Sorry, Baby

Best Movie by a Woman

Winner: Chloé Zhao (Hamnet)

Runner Up: Eva Victor (Sorry, Baby)

Lynne Ramsay (Die My Love)

Mary Bronstein (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You)

Best Woman Storyteller (Screenwriting Award)

Winner: Chloé Zhao, Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet)

Runner Up: Eva Victor (Sorry, Baby)

Lynne Ramsay, Alice Birch (with Enda Walsh) (Die My Love)

Mary Bronstein (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You)

Best Actress

Winner: Jessie Buckley (Hamnet)

Runner Up: Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You)

Amanda Seyfried (The Testament of Ann Lee)

Jennifer Lawrence (Die My Love)

Best Actor

Winner: Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon)

Runner Up: Michael B. Jordan (Sinners)

Leonardo DiCaprio (One Battle After Another)

Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme)

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Regina Hall (One Battle After Another)

Runner Up: Andrea Riseborough (Goodbye June)

Odessa A’zion (Marty Supreme)

Samantha Morton (Anemone)

Best Foreign Film by or About Women

Winner (tie): Left-Handed Girl

Winner (tie): The Voice of Hind Rajab

All That’s Left of You

Belén

Best Documentary by or About Women

Winner: My Mom Jayne

Runner Up: The Perfect Neighbor

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

The Librarians

Best Equality of the Sexes

Winner: Sinners

Runner Up: The Testament of Ann Lee

Lilly

Tatami

Best Animated Female

Winner: Rumi (KPop Demon Hunters)

Runner Up (tie): Amélie (Little Amélie or the Character of Rain)

Runner Up (tie): Judy Hopps (Zootopia 2)

Scarlet (Scarlet)

Best Screen Couple

Winner: Wunmi Mosaku and Michael B. Jordan (Sinners)

Runner Up: Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal (Hamnet)

Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller (Eternity)

Laura Dern and Will Arnett (Is This Thing On?)

Best TV Series

Winner: Hacks (Season 4)

Runner Up: Dying for Sex

The Girlfriend

The White Lotus (Season 3)

Adrienne Shelly Award* – For a film that most passionately opposes violence against women

Winner: Sorry, Baby

Runner Up: Christy

Companion

Lilly

Josephine Baker Award* – For best expressing the woman of color experience in America

Winner: Sinners

Runner Up: Hedda

Rosemead

Wicked: For Good

Karen Morely Award* – For best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity

Winner: Eleanor the Great

Runner Up (tie): Die My Love

Runner Up (tie): The Testament of Ann Lee

Familiar Touch

Acting and Activism Award

America Ferrera

Lifetime Achievement Award

Diane Keaton

 

*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.

*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.

*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.