The Gotham Awards proved a great night for multiple films, but especially for A24 who dominated the prizes with multiple awards for both First Reformed and Eighth Grade and even a Best Actress win for our beloved Toni Collette in Hereditary.  Not that other studios didn't get some attention. Sony Picture Classics nabbed a surprise win in the Best Feature category and Fox Searchlight's The Favourite got a lot of attention, given that it received essentially two special prizes with an Ensemble Award and a tribute to Rachel Weisz. Weisz brought her co-stars along in cutout form in the acceptance speech - love it! 

 The list of winners and a few notes are after the jump...

Best Feature The Rider
What a strange journey The Rider  has had. It was nominated for four Spirit Awards last year including Best Feature losing all of them, before it had been released. Then it was a sleeper hit in arthouses this past spring despite no real known quantities (the director's second film, the stars first), and now it takes Best Feature at the Gothams beating more high profile films like First Reformed, The Favourite, and If Beale Street Could Talk as well as the tiny arthouse indie Madeline's Madeline.

 
Best Actress Toni Collette for Hereditary
Toni wasn't at the ceremony so director Ari Aster accepted thanking her for being incredible and because "her participation got it made." We hope that this isn't Toni's last award this season given the thousands of critics groups that like to hand out prizes but competition sure is stiff in such an amazing Best Actress year. That she managed to beat Glenn Close in The Wife her is something, isn't it! (On the other hand the Gothams are scrappy prizes and perhaps The Wife is too Oscar lite, for them?) 

We daren't hope this means Colette could be Oscar nominated. It is still, in the end,  a really grotesque horror entertainment.

Ethan Hawke with Alessandro Nivola