ICYMI - The Goya Nominations & Winners

by Nathaniel R

In case you missed them... and you might have because we forgot to share them, let's talk about the annual Goya Awards honoring Spanish cinema. Last season Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas's most recent collaboration Pain & Glory was the champ. To honor the 2020 film year, Banderas himself will direct and present the live-streamed ceremony in March 2021. This year the Africa-set drama Adú which is currently streaming on Netflix, and the girls school drama SchoolGirls lead the nominations with 14 and 9 nominations respectively.  UPDATE 3/ 8: Schoolgirls (or The Girls) took the top prize at the ceremony but it tied Adú in wins with 4 each. Coven (also known as Akelarre) won the most trophies with 5 craft wins.

The nominees and winners for the 35th annual Goyas and a few notes are after the jump...

Best Film

• Adú (three different stories taking place in Africa)
• Ane Is Missing (drama about a missing child)
• Rosa's Wedding (comedy about a 45 year old woman starting her own business)
• Schoolgirls  ★ (drama about pre-teen girls in a convent school)
• The People Upstairs (comedy)

[OSCAR NERD DETAIL: You'll notice straight away that Spain's current Oscar submission, The Endless Trench is missing. That's because it competed at last year's Goyas. The calendars typically run beginning of October the previous year through end of September the current year for Best International Film submissions at the Oscars. That's going to make selection for next year's Oscar submissions strange for lots of countries because nothing released in 2020 will be eligible for submission at all due to the COVID eligibility extension which made the current submission eligibility period run through the end of December 2020 (three extra months!). Next year, presuming the International Film calendar snaps back to normal, countries will only have 9 months of releases (January-September) to choose from when they pick their Oscar submission.]

Best Director 

Isabel Coixet with her latest

• Salvador Calvo (3rd nomination) for Adú  ★ 
• Juanma Bajo Ulloa (5th nomination, 3 wins) for Baby
• Icíar Bollain (12th nomination, 2 wins) for Rosa's Wedding
• Isabel Coixet (13th nomination, 7 wins) for It Snows in Benidorm

Only two of the five best film nominees, landed directing nominations. Interesting. But the two directors who scored without their films nominated for the top prize are both Goya favourites. Ulloa has won the Goya in three different categories (Short, Screenplay, New Director) and Coixet has won in four different categories (Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Director, and Documentary). Ulloa's film Baby is about a young drug addict who sells her infant when she can't care for her. It Snows in Benidorm, the latest from Coixet, is about an early retiree (Timothy Spall) discovering that his brother has gone missing; Coixet often works with English-language stars. Her previous English language films are The Secret Life of Words, Elegy, Learning to Drive, and The Bookshop (which was a big winner at the Goyas)

Best New Director

• Pilar Palomero for Schoolgirls  ★ 
• David Pérez Sañudo for Ane is Missing
• Bernabé Rico for El inconvenient
• Núria Giménez Lorang for My Mexican Bretzel

Best Actress 

Candela Peña in Rosa's Wedding

• Amaia Aberasturi (1st nomination) for Coven
• Patricia López Arnaiz (1st nomination) for Ane is Missing  ★ 
• Kiti Manver (2nd nomination) for El Inconvient
• Candela Peña (8th nomination, 3 wins) for Rosa's Wedding

Peña (All About My Mother, Princesas) is the Goya veteran here. 

Best Actor

• Mario Casas (1st nomination) for Cross the Line  ★ 
• Javier Cámara (8th nomination / 2 wins) for The People Upstairs
• Ernesto Alterio (3rd nomination)  for A Normal World
• David Verdaguer (3rd nomination / 1 win)  for One for All

Cámara (Bad Education, Talk to Her) is also the lead of Forgotten We'll Be which is nominated at the Goyas as well and is Colombia's Oscar submission. 

Best Supporting Actress

Verónica Echegui in My Heart Goes Boom

• Juana Acosta (1st nomination) for El inconvenient
• Verónica Echegui (4th nomination) for My Heart Goes Boom!
• Natalia de Molina (5th nomination, 2 wins) for The Girls
• Nathalie Poza (6th nomination, 1 win) for Rosa's Wedding  ★ 

Best Supporting Actor 

• Sergi López (4th nomination) for Rosa's Wedding
• Juan Diego Botto (6th nomination) for The Europeans
• Alberto San Juan (3rd nomination, 1 win) for The People Upstairs  ★ 
• Álvaro Cervantes (2nd nomination) for Adú

Best Actress Newcomer 

• Jone Laspiur for Ane is Missing  ★ 
• Paula Usero for Rosa's Wedding
• Milena Smith for Cross the Line
• Griselda Siciliani for The People Upstairs

Best Actor Newcomer 

Matias Janick in Historias Lamentables

• Adam Nourou for Adú  ★ 
• Chema del Barco for The Plan
• Matias Janick for Historias lamentables
• Fernando Valdivielso for Cross the Line

Best Original Screenplay

• Adu
• Rosa's Wedding
• Historias lamentables
• SchoolGirls  ★ 

Best Adapted Screenplay

• The People Upstairs
• Ane is Missing  ★ 
• The Europeans
• Unknown Origins

Best Animated Film

• Turu, the Wacky Hen  ★ 

Best Documentary 

• Anatomía de un dandy
• Drowning Letters
• The Year of the Discovery  ★ 
• My Mexican Bretzel

Best European Film

• Corpus Christi (Poland)
• The Father (UK)  ★ 
• An Officer and A Spy (France)
• Falling (UK)

So last year's controversial César winner, Poland's most recent Oscar nominee, the current Oscar hopeful The Father and... Viggo Mortensen's Falling? One of these things is not like the others.

Best Ibero-American Film 

• The Mole Agent (Chile) 
• Forgotten We'll Be (Colombia)  ★ 
• La llorona (Guatemala) 
• I'm No Longer Here (México)

All four of these films are Oscar submissions this season for their countries. 

Best Cinematography

• Adú
• Coven
• Black Beach
• SchoolGirls  ★ 

Black Beach is an action film starring Raül Arevalo (Pain and Glory, Marshland, I'm So Excited) as a  businessman mixed up in the drama of the kidnapping of a US engineer. 

Best Production Management

Coven

• Adú ★
• Coven
• Black Beach
• It Snows in Benidorm

Coven is a historical drama set in the early 17th century when men were sent to Basque country to burn any girl suspected of witchcraft. It's from the director Pablo Agüero who made the very strange and experimental Eva Doesn't Sleep six years back.

Best Original Music 

• Adú
• Coven ★
• Baby
• El verano que vivimos

Best Original Song

• Adú
• El verano que vivimos
• Rosa's Wedding ★
• The Girls

Best Editing 

• Adú
• Black Beach
• The Year of the Discovery ★
• The Girls

The Year of the Discovery is a documentary about riots in the southern town of Cartagena in 1992, when Spain was hosting the Olympics

Best Sound 

• Adú ★
• Coven
• Black Beach
• The Plan

Best Art Direction

• Adú
• Coven ★
• Black Beach
• The Girls

Best Costume Design 

Raúl Arévalo and Juan Diego Botto in The Europeans

• Coven ★
• My Heart Goes Boom! 
• The Girls
• The Europeans

Juan Diego Botto and Raul Arevalo star in The Europeans which is a film about two single friends on a trip to Ibiza.

Best Makeup and Hairdressing

• Adú
• Coven ★
• My Heart Goes Boom!
• Unknown Origins

We believe My Heart Goes Boom (known as Explota Explota) is a musical. 

Best Special Effects 

• Coven ★
• Adú
• Black Beach

Honorary Goya

Ángela Molina in Live Flesh

• The actress Angela Molina (That Obscure Object of Desire, Blancanieves, The Unknown Woman, Live Flesh, Lola, Broken Embraces, Camorra) who is now 65 years old and has quite an impressive filmography. She was nominated for the Goya five times in her career but never won. (This is how you do Honoraries, AMPAS. The people who've already won really don't need to be given Honoraries, too!)

The 2021 Goya Awards will be awarded in Málaga, Spain on March 6th.  

Comments

[steeevenjohnson]

Nice article!

[Jose Luis]

Great article. Thanks Nathaniel! Not seen all but I like. Rosa's wedding, Adu, Unfortunate Stories, and Cross the line.

[Jesus Alonso]

Unfortunate Stories was SO robbed... only 3 noms? It may be one of the top 10 spanish films from the last decade!

But kind of understandable... Goya disses Fesser when he goes for his personal style comedy and they gave him a 2nd Best Picture award last year, for his worst film, "Campeones" (still, Fesser's worst is the best most filmmakers can aspire to shoot, ehem). Fesser is a mix of Berlanga, Looney Tunes, Fellini, Spielberg, among other influences... and probably along Almodóvar and Vigalondo, the sacred trinity of spanish directors at work, to my taste: personal, unique, true authors with their own universes.

[Jesus Alonso]

my bad, Campeones won for 2018, last year was Pain & Glory

[Mirko]

Didn’t know Ullla had a new film this year, I remember I met him in Naples many years ago, a where a local festival were showing his pictures and even if he was quite young it seems he was quite disappointed of film industry, especially he was quite pissed that he couldn’t find a way to make the film about the comix Capitan Trueno (which it was made later by Los Borgias director, if I am not wrong)

[Enrique]

Unfortunate Stories / Historias Lamentables is a very funny movie. Thanks for the article.

[César Gaytán]

Iciar Bollain directing a comedy starring Candela Peña? They worked great together in the masterful Te Doy Mis Ojos (Take My Eyes) I have to watch this film.

[Peggy Sue]

Banderas, Ana Belén, Marisa Paredes, Ángela Molina... they corrected all their wrongs in less than five years. That's how you do it with, AMPAS.

[harmodio]

Correction in Best Actress in Leading Role:
Andrea Fandos is not nominated for the Goya.
The one who is nominated is Kiti Mánver for her performance in El inconveniente. This is Kiti Mánver's second nomination in her career. She won Best Actress in Supporting Role for Todo por la pasta and has acted in several films directed by Pedro Almodovar.

And another correction: It is Best New Director not Best Novel Adaptation.

[NATHANIEL R]

harmodio - thanks. fixed.

[Raimunda]

They got the worst numbers in Europe. Not sure there will be a gala.