The Gotham Award Nominations Are Out, and The Invite and Clarissa Are the Only Films in Every Race

Photo: Kidfly182, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Gotham Film Awards announced their nominations on Tuesday, October 27, and as usual they are the first real data point of the awards season. Forty-two features and twenty-five performances across eleven categories. Five films tied at the top with four nominations each: Clarissa, The Invite, All of a Sudden, La Gradiva and Tender Loving Care. Only two of those, Clarissa and The Invite, made the Best Feature list, which now runs eleven deep.

Photo: Marlene Landu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Invite is the one I have already written about. Olivia Wilde's dinner party comedy went to HBO Max after a short cinema run and I thought it deserved more attention than it got. Four Gotham nominations is more attention. The Gothams have a budget cap, which keeps the studio films out and means a comedy with a real cast can compete on its own terms, and that is what seems to have happened.

Photo: Andrew Choy, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Clarissa I have not seen and need to. Seven more films took three nominations each, and the titles alone tell you how weird the year has been: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Primetime and Minotaur among them. The Audience Award is back, which means a popular pick gets a prize alongside the critics' choices.

Photo: Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Gothams matter less as a predictor than people pretend. They are the New York independent film crowd voting on films that often never cross into the Oscar race. But they are the first room where a film like The Invite or Clarissa can get a win and a clip, and in a year where the Oscar frontrunners are enormous, The Odyssey and La Bola Negra and Wild Horse Nine, the small films need every early room they can get.

Photo: TouchedbyStyle, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The ceremony is in early December. Have you seen any of the five leaders, or is this the list you use to build a December watchlist?