The Women Film Critics Circle Awards 2018

The Women Film Critics Circle Announces Awards 2018

The Women Film Critics Circle has announced their 2018 Awards for the best movies this year by and about women, and outstanding achievements by women, who get to be rarely honored historically, in the film world.

The Women Film Critics Circle is an association of women film critics and scholars from around the country and internationally, who are involved in print, radio, online and TV broadcast media. They came together in 2004 to form the first women critics' organization in the United States, in the belief that women's perspectives and voices in film criticism need to be recognized fully.

Critical Women On Film, a presentation of The Women Film Critics Circle, is their journal of discussion and theory, and a gathering of women's voices expressing a fresh and differently experienced perspective from the primarily male dominated film criticism world. Critical Women On Film is online HERE

THE WOMEN FILM CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2018

BEST MOVIE ABOUT WOMEN

Mary Shelley
**The Favourite
Roma: Runner-up
Widows

               Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley

BEST MOVIE BY A WOMAN
**Can You Ever Forgive Me? Marielle Heller
Leave No Trace: Runner-up, Debra Granik
The Kindergarten Teacher
You Were Never Really Here

BEST WOMAN STORYTELLER [Screenwriting Award]
**Audrey Wells: The Hate U Give
Debra Granik: Leave No Trace, Runner-up 
Sara Colangelo: The Kindergarten Teacher
Tamara Jenkins: Private Life

                                    Widows

BEST ACTRESS

**Olivia Colman, The Favourite

Toni Collette, Hereditary, Runner-up

Viola Davis, Widows
Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Kindergarten Teacher

BEST ACTOR
**Ethan Hawke, First Reformed
Viggo Mortensen, Green Book, Runner-up

Ben Foster, Leave No Trace

Hugo Weaving, Black 47

BEST YOUNG ACTRESS
**Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade
Thomasin McKenzie, Leave No Trace Runner-up
Elle Fanning, Mary Shelley 

Amandla Stenberg, The Hate U Give

BEST COMEDIC ACTRESS
**Olivia Colman, The Favourite
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me? Runner-up
Helena Bonham Carter, 55 Steps
Kathryn Hahn, Private Life

                      Yalitza Aparicio in Roma

BEST FOREIGN FILM BY OR ABOUT WOMEN

**Roma

Capernaum, Runner-up
Happy As Lazzaro

Zama

BEST DOCUMENTARY BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
**RBG

Shirkers, Runner-up
Say Her Name: The Life And Death Of Sandra Bland
Seeing Allred

*SPECIAL AWARDS*

COURAGE IN ACTING [Taking on unconventional roles that radically redefine the images of women on screen]
**Nicole Kidman: Destroyer
Viola Davis: Widows, Runner-up
Helena Bonham Carter: 55 Steps
Melissa McCarthy: Can You Ever Forgive Me?

COURAGE IN FILMMAKING
**Jennifer Fox, The Tale
Haifaa Al-Mansour, Mary Shelley, Runner-up
Sara Colangelo, The Kindergarten Teacher
Sandra Luckow, That Way Madness Lies

    Haifaa Al-Mansour, First Saudi Woman Director
 

*ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: For a film that most passionately opposes violence against women
**Say Her Name: The Life And Death Of Sandra Bland 

Call Her Ganda
I Am Not A Witch
On Her Shoulders

*JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: For best expressing the woman of color experience in America
**If Beale Street Could Talk
Life And Nothing More
The Hate U Give
Widows

*KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For best exemplifying a woman's place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity

**Roma

93 Queen
On The Basis Of Sex

Woman Walks Ahead

  
THE INVISIBLE WOMAN AWARD [Supporting performance by a woman whose exceptional impact on the film dramatically, socially or historically, has been ignored]

**Glenn Close, The Wife

Yalitza Aparicio, Roma

Andrea Riseborough, Nancy
The Women Of Widows

WOMEN'S WORK: BEST ENSEMBLE
**Widows

The Favourite, Runner-up

55 Steps
Ocean's Eight

Helena Bonham Carter and Hillary Swank: 55 Steps

BEST FEMALE ACTION HEROES

**Black Panther

Adrift
55 Steps

RGB

MOMMIE DEAREST WORST SCREEN MOM OF THE YEAR AWARD
**Jacki Weaver: Widows

BEST KEPT SECRET AWARD
All The Overlooked 'Gone Girls Of Cinema' PIONEERS: FIRST WOMEN FILMMAKERS -  A Kino Lorber Collectors Edition Release

BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES
**Black Panther
Like Me
On The Basis Of Sex
Widows

                        Addison Timlin: Like Me

BEST ANIMATED FEMALES
**Incredibles 2
Liyana
Mary And The Witch's Flower
Mirai No Mirai

BEST FAMILY FILM
**Eighth Grade
Incredibles 2
Science Fair
The Hate U Give

BEST SCREEN COUPLE
**If Beale Street Could Talk

A Star Is Born
Crazy Rich Asians
Disobedience

ACTING AND ACTIVISM AWARD

**Viola Davis

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
**Ellen Burstyn

 Ellen Burstyn: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore [1974]

WFCC HALL OF SHAME
**Member Picks:

*Fifty Shades Freed: For perpetuating unrealistic and demeaning stereotypes of women, being defined by men emotionally and physically.

*Bryan Singer: Accused of committing crimes against young men, his continued status as a hirable, high-paid director is an affront to the women in the film industry who are struggling for recognition.

*Les Moonves: Chairman and CEO of CBS, Moonves resigned in light of allegations that he sexually abused many women, and information on the culture of fear that he reigned over is now coming out.

Baby It's Cold Outside. This traditional holiday season song has now been banned on radio stations following Me-Too protests, as promoting suggestive date rape lyrics. The debate that has followed is raising critical issues for discussion, but all agree that the male character, however culturally dated, is creepy. The Oscar winning song originated in the 1949 musical Neptune's Daughter, performed by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban.

* As a footnote, perhaps more relevant during this season when greedy landlords deny heat to tenants, would be revising the title to: Baby It's Cold Inside!

*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 shower20rack 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.