Gotham Nominations: "The Favourite" and "First Reformed" Lead

by Nathaniel R

It's the first official awards announcement of the season! The Gotham Awards, the East Coast's answer to the Independent Spirit Awards, have announced their nominations with the palace intrigue tragicomedy The Favourite and the existential heavy drama of First Reformed sharing the lead with 3 matching honors each: Best Feature, Best Screenplay, and one acting citation (a special ensemble prize for the former and Ethan Hawke for the latter). One assumes that they'd have both been nominated for director, too, but one of the quirks of Gotham is that they don't have a Director category, only a category for brand new directors and we love the nominees there, especially Bo Burnham for Eighth Grade and Ari Aster for Hereditary. 

Other films receiving much needed good news since they were released before the fall glut and needed awards bodies to be reminded of them over the next few months: Leave No Trace, The Wife, Sorry to Bother You, and The Rider. The complete nominations and a few more comments after the jump...

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YNMS: Leave No Trace

Chris here. Now that the summer movie season has arrived (and earlier than ever) we're on the hunt for counterprogramming wherever we can find it. Enter film festival darling Leave No Trace, a drama about a father and daughter (Ben Foster and newcomer Thomasin McKenzie) struggling to reacclimate to society after living off the grid.

The film is director Debra Granik's narrative follow-up to the Oscar nominated Winter's Bone, which you will recall helped place none other than Jennifer Lawrence on the map. Trace debuted at Sundance and has been hitting regional festivals nonstop ever since, and will get another large platform when it plays Cannes' Directors Fortnight sidebar. That should build a whole bunch of word of mouth before the film arrives on June 29.

From the looks of the trailer, we're promised a film much less grim than how the film comes across on paper. Take a look and we'll break down the Yes No Maybe So...

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