Moonlight

The 90 or so members of the Hollywood Foreign Press are always an unpredictable bunch of awards season voters, but that made predictions for the 2017 Golden Globes’ Best Motion Picture Drama award even more uncertain. The awards race has been a close one this year between Manchester By the Sea and Moonlight (and especially close in the Drama category at the Globes with other frontrunner La La Land in the Comedy category). But this year the HFPA decided to honor the Kenneth Lonergan film / the Barry Jenkins film with the top drama prize.

It’s only logical: after cleaning up across the board with city-specific critics’ groups far and wide (ceding the occasional prize to La La Land, its closest awards-season competitor), Moonlight was awarded the distinction of 2016’s finest film from the National Society of Film Critics. In a decision stunning exactly nobody, Barry Jenkins’ heartfelt triptych about a young gay man’s coming-of-age in Miami took the Best Picture prize as well as the Best Director for Jenkins. Left in the runners-up column were all-but-certain Oscar nominees La La Land and Manchester by the Sea. In fact, Damien Chazelle’s crowd-pleasing musical got kind of skunked by the NSFC; Chazelle landed the runner-up Best Director spot behind Jenkins, the film shared the runner-up spot for Best Cinematography with Silence, and star Emma Stone was shut out entirely.

Stretching back as far as 1890, the British monarchy has made a habit of releasing a New Years Honors List every December 31, naming outstanding Britons who will receive new orders of chivalry or other official designation. (It’s a type of being knighted, but special in some key way that I don’t fully understand; Britain’s system of honors is awful confusing.) The list singles out British-born figures who have made outstanding contributions to the nation’s “society, business, or culture.” That particular definition comes from Deadline, who noted earlier today that some familiar faces from the cinema of 2016 will soon join the esteemed ranks of the hono(u)red British: actors Mark Rylance and Naomie Harris will be among the class of 2016 inductees, adding a few letters (but what important letters they are) to their names.

According to most people (on the internet, which is where most people live now), 2016 was horrific. It was a year in which we lost some of our best and brightest artists, a year in which we elected a president who will, according to Kate McKinnon’s Hilary Clinton, “kill us all,” and it was a year in which many blockbusters fulfilled the “bust” end of that promise. Despite all of this, 2016 delivered some truly remarkable films; because of all of this, we needed them.

Everybody and their mother runs some declaration of the year’s best movies in late December, and yet one is more objectively correct than all the others. (Excepting, of course, the rulings from ScreenCrush’s beloved Senior Editor Erin Whitney, who is unassailably just in all matters.) Through the month of December, Indiewire conducts a massive survey of over 200 film critics, polling their picks for the Best Picture as well as standout performances, writing, directing, and the other usual categories. This is the most good, right, and true expression of the year 2016 on film that you’ll find online, and I’m not just saying that because this is the one poll to which I contribute every year. (That may be partly it.)

How you define the “best” of something varies from one person to the next. The “best” movies can be the ones crafted with the most artistry, the ones that feel particularly culturally significant, the ones you can’t shake hours, days, or months after seeing them. Or perhaps the best films are the ones you simply love the most and are eager returning to again and again.

In these weeks before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences convenes to slaughter their sacrificial calf and read the blood spatter patterns to determine this year’s nominees, there’s been quite a bit of category rejiggering. Everyone wants some gold, and because some races are more easily won, crafty studios have been determining the most advantageous way to shape their For Your Consideration campaigns. Viola Davis, for instance, probably could have competed in the Best Actress category for her titanic performance as the long-suffering wife in Denzel Washington’s adaptation of Fences. But with the 2016 Best Actress scramble already approaching a de facto showdown between La La Land‘s Emma Stone and Jackie‘s Natalie Portman, Davis smartly ended up in consideration for Best Supporting Actress.

The major inside-industry awards come from the Producers’ Guild of America, the Writers’ Guild of America, the Directors’ Guild of America, and the Screen Actors’ Guild. This morning, the nominations for the 2017 SAG Awards were announced from Los Angeles, with a smattering of surprises and populist favorites (what’s up, Stranger Things) among the established awards season juggernauts. (The Natalie Portman v. Emma Stone showdown continues.)

Following Sunday night’s Critics’ Choice Awards, the Golden Globes nominations have arrived. On Monday morning, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced their nominees for the 2017 awards, recognizing the best in film and television.

As December rolls on, so too does the cavalcade of year-end lists. The latest authority to weigh in is AFI, by which I mean the American Film Institute and not the Californian alternative-rock group also known as A Fire Inside. While we may never know which films the quartet behind “Miss Murder” favored this year, the other AFI has released their list of 2016’s ten best releases, and it’s a little more varied than some of the heretofore published lists, bringing in some films with less awards buzz along with your usual suspects of Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, and La La Land.