Movies for Grownups 2024 Awards: Meet the Winners!

Best Actor

Colman Domingo

Rustin

Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin was 51 when he and A. Philip Randolph organized the 1963 March on Washington, then the biggest peaceful protest in U.S. history. He challenged Martin Luther King Jr. to go there and address the crowd. The event, which featured King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, helped inspire the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And Domingo (now 54) was 51 when filming took place — proof that age is no obstacle when it comes to changing history or immortalizing on film a character who’s been almost totally erased from history because he was gay. Domingo captures Rustin’s electrifying charisma, droll wit, intellectual firepower and personal pains, from the tooth a cop knocked out when he dared to take a bus seat to the cruel disrespect he received from civil rights colleagues.

 

Best Supporting Actor

Robert De Niro

Killers of the Flower Moon

De Niro has never crafted a more chillingly brilliant performance than his turn as William King Hale, the real-life monster and self-made businessman who posed as the best friend the Osage ever had in Oklahoma, building them schools and hospitals — while secretly having them poisoned, shot and bombed to line his pockets and those of his crime ring.

Best Actress

Annette Bening

Nyad

Bening, 65, didn’t permit a stunt double to do a single stroke in her movie about Diana Nyad, who at 64 ­— after a few well-publicized failures to do so — successfully swam from Havana to Key West, braving jellyfish, the elements and her own demons. Bening trained daily for a year with Olympic swimmer Rada Owen, but it was her acting chops that brought Nyad alive on-screen. When the film alternates real footage of Nyad with Bening, it seems like the same person — the kind of athlete even a shark might hesitate to cross. It has to be said: If there were an Olympics for acting, Bening would take the gold.

 

Best Supporting Actress

Jodie Foster

Nyad

If you thought Jodie Foster, 61, was tough in The Silence of the Lambs, wait until you see her as Diana Nyad’s coach Bonnie Stoll. Her performance is crucial, because the film’s not just the story of one determined athlete, but a buddy picture about Nyad’s relationship with the salt-of-the-earth friend and trainer who got her through personal and physical storms. Bening was grateful for Foster’s longer acting experience (57 years versus her 43), and like Nyad and Stoll, they’ve triumphed together as Movies for Grownups Award winners. Foster said she took the part to show the world that older women could be, as she put it, “badasses.” And indeed she did.

 

Best Screenwriter

Noah Baumbach (with Greta Gerwig)

Barbie

Naturally, director Gerwig, 40, gets the lion’s share of glory for the $1.45 billion blockbuster, not her cowriter and husband, Baumbach, 54. She signed the deal to write the screenplay together — without telling him. At first, Baumbach pleaded, “You gotta get us out of this!” But when they started writing, confident that nobody would let them actually film something so strange, funny and full of pop culture in-jokes, they had a blast. The Barbie-Ken tensions are doubtless informed by their own relationship as auteurs whose Marriage Story (directed by Baumbach) and Little Women (directed by Gerwig) competed for Oscars in 2020. Baumbach defended Barbie against critics who called its satire of Ken anti-man, saying, “I felt men could take it.” And only one man could help make it.

Best Time Capsule

Maestro

Besides depicting the tumultuous love story of Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) and his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), Maestro captures the look and feel of their decades together. “It’s such a great window into the 20th century,” says their son, Alexander Bernstein, 68. In scenes filmed in the Bernsteins’ Connecticut mansion, Cooper and Mulligan wear Felicia’s and Leonard’s actual clothes — which fit! Director Cooper studied old radio and TV shows, home movies and settings from Carnegie Hall to London’s Ely Cathedral. Even the cinematography feels authentic, switching from 1940s black and white to modern color and camera lenses. “It really dovetails with my own memories,” says their daughter, Jamie Bernstein, 71.

Best Ensemble

The Color Purple

The musical version of the 1982 Alice Walker novel — and the 1985 Whoopi Goldberg film — is a parade of talents blending in story and song. As Celie, American Idol’s Fantasia Barrino steals the show, but Danielle Brooks is compelling as the spirited Sofia. Taraji P. Henson, 53, as Shug Avery, completes the trifecta in a female-centric drama, Colman Domingo is terrifying as vicious “Mister” Johnson, and the characters’ connections build the film to a stand-up-and-cheer finale.

Best Intergenerational Film

The Holdovers

Paul Giamatti, 56, plays hilariously curmudgeonly boarding school teacher Paul Hunham, forced to babysit a few students over Christmas break 1970, reluctantly bonding with a misfit kid (Dominic Sessa). The movie’s authentic depiction of the New England academic milieu is not surprising, since Yale grad Giamatti’s dad, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was Yale’s president. And screenwriter David Hemingson, 59 — whose own dad was the elder Giamatti’s Yale classmate — has Hunham berate his students with insults that Hemingson overheard people use, such as “entitled degenerates” and “snarling Visigoths.” The result is the most poignant teacher-student movie since Dead Poets Society.

Best Documentary

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

In this moving bio-doc, Fox, 62, the icon diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, reveals how he copes with pain and muscle tremors — and that his quick wit remains utterly unimpaired. He’s not the only one who has to reconsider priorities after an ailment strikes and figure out how to make the most of life when the unthinkable happens.

Best Foreign Film

The Zone of Interest

Directed by Jonathan Glazer, 58, this loose adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel of the same name features the “Queen of Auschwitz” (Sandra Hüller, the most talked-about foreign actress of 2023), the wife of Nazi commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel). She tends to her kids in an Edenic garden lit by the crematoria yards away, comforting herself with items stolen from the camp’s victims, such as fur coats and a tube of toothpaste in which somebody hid precious jewelry. It’s a remarkably original Holocaust movie, focusing on the lives and minds of the killers, not the victims.

Television Awards

Best Actor (TV): Bryan Cranston, 67, Your Honor

The Breaking Bad star plays disgraced judge-turned-convict Michael Desiato with brooding gravitas.

 

Best Actress (TV): Jennifer Coolidge, 62, The White Lotus

She arrived at A-list fame like Cinderella on a rocket sled as the hit show’s Tanya McQuoid, a dizzy, appalling, yet appealing heiress on the romantic trip of a (short) lifetime.

Best Series: Succession

TV’s most cynically realistic hit, about the cutthroat kids of media patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox, 77), had an utterly brilliant, twisty finale.

Best Reality Series: The Golden Bachelor

The most unexpected hit of the year, and the only one with an L.A. billboard featuring AARP’s headline (“He’s Hot. He’s Sexy. He’s 72”). The Golden Bachelor refuted ageism, reminding everyone that people 50-plus are still in the dating game.