2020 Movies for Grownups Awards Nominees

• Delroy Lindo, Da 5 Bloods

In one of the trickiest, finest roles, longtime Spike Lee collaborator Lindo outdoes himself as a PTSD-afflicted, MAGA hat-wearing veteran who returns with war buddies to Vietnam to search for their leader's lost remains.

• Gary Oldman, Mank

If you thought Oldman was great as Winston Churchill, you should see him as the alcoholic gambler genius who wrote Citizen Kane and fought Orson Welles for the credit.

Best Supporting Actress

• Candice Bergen, Let Them All Talk

Her talent was wasted in youth, came of age with Murphy Brown and hits a new high with this role, a peevish lingerie saleswoman enraged after a friend (Meryl Streep) tells her life story in a novel.

• Ellen Burstyn, Pieces of a Woman

At 88, Burstyn could become the oldest-ever Oscar nominee in an acting category. She plays a Holocaust survivor whose tough love combats a daughter's grief over losing a child.

• Glenn Close, Hillbilly Elegy

Close transforms herself in the unlikely yet true tale of Mamaw, a gun-toting, chain-smoking rural woman who rescues her teen grandson from his addict mom.

• Jodie Foster, The Mauritanian

Foster plays the emotionally driven, race-car-driving defense attorney for a falsely accused Guantanamo Bay prisoner in this story of justice and forgiveness.

• Yuh-Jung Youn, Minari

Youn plays a Korean immigrant who puzzles her American grandkids: She loves to swear, gamble, watch TV wrestling and solve her clan's problems.

Best Supporting Actor

• Demián Bichir, Land

When Robin Wright's character becomes a wilderness recluse, Bichir's mountain man shows her how to hunt, trap and survive her own demons (and bears).

• Bill Murray, On the Rocks

Murray stars in a comedy about a playboy dad who helps his daughter spy on her tomcat husband and rediscover their own bond.

• Clarke Peters, Da 5 Bloods

Known as a central character on TV's The Wire and Treme, Peters plays the calming conscience of a group of war veterans returning to Vietnam.

• Paul Raci, Sound of Metal

Raci is uncommonly convincing as the addiction program director for the film's hearing-impaired musician hero. (He was once an addict himself and both his parents were deaf.). And now this renowned stage actor is breaking out at last as a film star.

• Mark Rylance, The Trial of the Chicago 7

As trial lawyer William Kunstler, Rylance's quietly intense performance gives a sprawling multicharacter drama a calm center.

Best Director

• Lee Daniels, The United States vs. Billie Holiday

Diana Ross’ 1972 drama Lady Sings the Blues inspired Daniels to become a director (who later earned an Oscar nomination for Precious). His Billie Holiday biopic is even better.

• Regina King, One Night in Miami

In an auspicious directing debut, the renowned actress adapts a play about the real-life encounter of four Black heroes — and shows an absolute mastery of directing great actors.

• Spike Lee, Da 5 Bloods

Lee is a master of cinema, and here he focuses not on youth but age: Vietnam vets flashing back to the past.

• Aaron Sorkin, The Trial of the Chicago 7

Long showered with awards as a writer, he breaks out as an A-list director with his second effort (after 2017's Molly's Game), about the 1960s wildest trial.

• George C. Wolfe, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

He nimbly adapts Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson's first masterpiece about Black American history.

Best Screenwriter

• Da 5 Bloods (Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee)

De Meo and Bilson first wrote the script to be Oliver Stone's fourth Vietnam film. Lee took over and made it a meditation on age, race, colonialism and brotherhood.

• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (Ruben Santiago-Hudson)

A noted Broadway and TV actor, Santiago-Hudson knows August Wilson's work as an actor and a director. His expertise shows in this Wilson adaptation.

• News of the World (Paul Greengrass, Luke Davies)

Adapting Paulette Jiles’ novel, they craft a script worthy of Hollywood's golden age.

• One Night in Miami (Kemp Powers)

He started out writing a book about four icons on an historic evening. But it turned into a play, and then a movie, that is a fascinating debate about different ideas of Black self-determination and Black power.

• The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin)

Sorkin pulls off his trickiest writing feat yet, turning a complicated real-life case into a well-knit narrative.

Best Ensemble

• Da 5 Bloods

With utter conviction, actors who've known each others’ work well for years convincingly portray a group of 60-something men bonded by Vietnam trauma.

• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

In a band room the filmmakers conceived of as a boxing ring of drama, an all-star cast puts on a bout in which everyone comes out a champion.

• One Night in Miami

Portraying legendary men, the actors take the icons off their pedestals and render them as flesh-and-blood youngsters with big ideas that changed the world.

• Promising Young Woman

Some of filmdom's finest actors anchor a darkly comic revenge fantasy with emotional authenticity

• The Trial of the Chicago 7

The large cast captures the divisions between revolutionaries who couldn't agree on lunch, let alone conspiracy, and the legal plight that unites them.

Best Intergenerational Film

• The Father

The film takes us into the heart of the patient's caregiver daughter (Olivia Colman) in order to show the impact that Alzheimer's has on a family.

• Hillbilly Elegy

A film about an all-too-common phenomenon: a grandmother who steps in to save a grandchild when her own daughter isn't up to the task of parenthood.

• The Life Ahead

Sophia Loren's aging heroine forges a bond with a troubled teenager and is dedicated to save the younger generation.

• Minari

An instant classic about the immigrant experience, the film conveys the immense impact a grandma from the old country can have on a family.

• On the Rocks

Murray, once a young rebel who changed comedy, proves himself a past master of grownup father-daughter drama.

Best Buddy Picture

• Bad Boys for Life

Bad-boy cops of 1995, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith reunite and deepen their relationship, making this third buddy picture more than an action romp.

• Bill & Ted Face the Music

In their third time-tripping comedy, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter meet not only Louis Armstrong, Mozart and Jimi Hendrix, but also themselves in youth and extreme age.

• Da 5 Bloods

Though it's a Vietnam heist movie inspired by the 1948 classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, at its heart is the relationships between old soldiers.

• Let Them All Talk

Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest star as lifelong pals struggling to cope with the effects of one friend's spectacular success.

• Standing Up, Falling Down

What could possibly redeem the life of a flopped stand-up comic (Parks and Recreation's Ben Schwartz)? A new relationship with a surrogate father figure, a karaoke-prone old dermatologist (Billy Crystal).

Best Time Capsule

• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

The film recreates Chicago in the 1920s, when Ma Rainey's song helped make the Black Bottom Dance more popular than the Charleston.

• Mank

The film's investigation of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz's creative impact on Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane is a portrait of Hollywood in its morally tarnished golden age.

• One Night in Miami

Besides the fabulous cast, what makes this quadruple biopic click is the meticulous recreation of the feel, look and sounds of Miami in 1964.

• Trial of the Chicago 7

Long after the passions ignited by the Vietnam War and the protests against it have passed, the film brings it all back alive, as if its moment were now.

• The United States vs. Billie Holiday

Not simply the story of one woman's life, it describes an era when Black musicians had their work stolen by white culture and the government used drug laws to target an artist.

Best Grownup Love Story

• Emma

The Queen's Gambit breakout star Anya Taylor-Joy plays Jane Austen's heroine who finds love when she least expects it. But the best relationship in the film is that of Emma and her hypochondriac dad (the immortal Bill Nighy).

• Ordinary Love

What's the lesson of this movie about what happens when breast cancer strikes a loving couple (Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville)? Says Manville: “If you can do your best to see the good in things, to carry your own private little torch, endure all life throws at you with a glass half full, you're winning."

• Supernova

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci movingly portray a couple who, after 20 years together, face early-onset dementia with courage and grace.

• Wild Mountain Thyme

In a comic drama as Irish as the Blarney Stone, Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan play neurotic lovers whose courtship gets stalled for 30 years.

• Working Man

In his first lead film role — at age 80 — renowned character actor Peter Gerety plays a laid-off factory worker who rekindles his ailing marriage (with Talia Shire of Rocky fame).

Best Documentary

• Crip Camp

The inspiring story of the 1970s camp for kids with polio, cerebral palsy and other disabilities who grew up to become transformative activists for disability rights.

• Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy

A portrait of the 97-year-old British woman who brought Mexican cuisine to the masses and earned the moniker “the Indiana Jones of food."

• Dick Johnson Is Dead

In a bittersweet, hilarious attempt to make her father immortal after he is diagnosed with dementia, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson stages his death — in inventive and crazy ways — and his miraculous revivals to help them both face the inevitable.

• A Secret Love

The film reveals the relationship between a baseball player from the women's team that inspired A League of Their Own and the female love of her life.

• Sky Blossom: Diaries of the Next Greatest Generation

In wartime, when parachutists arrive to rescue soldiers on the ground, they say, “Here come the sky blossoms!” This documentary celebrates the teens and millennials from military families who are caregivers to their injured elder relatives.

Best Foreign Language Film

• Another Round (Denmark)

Mads Mikkelsen plays a guy who decides on his birthday to lead his friends in a new way to cope with midlife malaise: Stay slightly tipsy all day, every day.

• Bacurau (Brazil)

In a bizarrely inventive sci-fi western, a local doctor (Sônia Braga) tends to a forgotten village attacked by gun-toting tourists led by a madman (Udo Kier).

• Collective (Romania)

A scathing documentary about a 2015 Bucharest nightclub fire (that ended up killing 64) and its aggressive cover-up by ghastly medical and governmental corruption.

• The Life Ahead (Italy)

What could be better than French legend Simone Signoret in the 1977 adaptation of Romain Gary's novel Madame Rosa? The 2020 adaptation by Edoardo Ponti starring his mom, Sophia Loren.

• The Weasels’ Tale (Argentina)

A once-famous actress, her once-not-so-famous actor husband, and a renowned director and screenwriter — all in their 70s and long retired — outwit young real estate developers who are out to scam them.

TV Nominees

Best Actress

• Jennifer Aniston, The Morning Show

Aniston is at home as a volatile morning TV news anchor navigating controversies in the #MeToo era in the flagship series on Apple TV+.

• Cate Blanchett, Mrs. America

Blanchett shines as conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly in her successful 1970s battle to keep the Equal Rights Amendment out of the Constitution.

• Regina King, Watchmen

In the smartest superhero show you ever saw, King plays Sister Night, a cop turned vigilante who's battling white supremacists in Tulsa, Oklahoma, complete with flashbacks to the 1920 Tulsa Race Massacre.

• Laura Linney, Ozark

Linney plays a suburban Chicago mom who becomes a Missouri riverboat casino entrepreneur and gets mixed up with ruthless mobsters and addicted to ambition.

• Catherine O'Hara, Schitt's Creek

Half a century after she started out as Gilda Radner's understudy, O'Hara is having her moment, starring as a rich eccentric who goes broke and is forced to live in a little town she bought on a lark.

Best Actor

• Jason Bateman, Ozark

Bateman is brilliant as a financial adviser who drags his family to the Ozarks to launder cash for a drug cartel.

• Ted Danson, The Good Place

Danson excels as a kind of jaunty Willy Wonka of the afterlife, welcoming and guiding newcomers to a magical place that seems heavenly — but has some dark secrets.

• Hugh Grant, The Undoing

With an ambiguously charming twinkle in his eye, Grant keeps us guessing as a dashing doctor and doting dad who just might be a ruthless killer.

• Ethan Hawke, The Good Lord Bird

Thunderously and at times comically, Hawke plays abolitionist John Brown, whose raid on Harper's Ferry sparked the Civil War.

• Mark Ruffalo, I Know This Much Is True

In the acting feat of the year, Ruffalo portrays identical twins — one struggling to help the other, who's afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia.

Best Series

• The Crown, Netflix

The show that fulfills every Anglophile's dream: to be a fly on the palace wall watching Britain's royal family behind closed doors.

• Perry Mason, HBO

Not a reboot of Raymond Burr's lawyer show (1957–1966), it's about a troubled World War I veteran in 1932 Los Angeles, the topsy-turvy era of scandal-plagued actors, radio evangelists and daredevil aviatrixes.

• Succession, HBO

The perfect show for an era of ruthless capitalism concerns a media conglomerate run by a scary patriarch (Brian Cox) who's locked in a mortal struggle with the son (Jeremy Strong) he tries to keep under his thumb.

• Ted Lasso, Apple TV+

The most warmhearted TV hero since Mister Rogers is Jason Sudeikis as Ted, an unstoppably optimistic small-college football coach hired by a pro soccer team in England — though he knows zilch about England or soccer.

• This Is Us, NBC

If it were simply a heartstring-tugging domestic drama, it would be good — but what makes it innovative is its bold flashbacks to four decades in the lives of a complicated extended family.

Best TV Movie/Limited Series

• Mrs. America, FX

A lively, intelligent dramatization of the 1970s fight over feminism, it boasts a stellar cast, with Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly, Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem, Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug and Uzo Aduba as Shirley Chisholm.

• The Queen's Gambit, Netflix

Nobody thought the world was panting for a series about a fictional girl chess prodigy in the ‘50s and ‘60s with some of Bobby Fischer's emotional problems. But it instantly became Netflix's most-watched scripted miniseries.

• Small Axe, Amazon

Comprising five fictional films rooted in real people's experiences, writer-director-producer Steve McQueen's TV opus adds up to a group portrait of the vibrant West Indian community in London from 1969 to 1982.

• Unorthodox, Netflix

Loosely based on a true story, it'sthe dazzlingly acted tale of 19-year-old woman who leaves her ultraorthodox Hasidic Brooklyn community for a modern life in Berlin.

• Watchmen, HBO

Though it's a sci-fi show, the sheer audacious intelligence and contemporary relevance of its race-relations drama won over even people who loathe that genre.