With New York kicking off awards season with the Gotham Awards and the NYFCC releasing their winners, it’s now time for the West coast to jump into the fray with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association announcing their winners for 2024 on Sunday, December 8.
LAFCA already unveiled that John Carpenter will be receiving the Career Achievement Award during its ceremony on Saturday, January 11, 2025 at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, but their picks for the best in film often serve as a strong prediction for Oscar nominees and winners.
In 2023, the LAFCA correctly predicted Emma Stone’s win for Best Actress in “Poor Things” over Lily Gladstone in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” though Stone was tied in the category with “The Zone of Interest” star Sandra Hüller. “The Zone of Interest” also took home the prize for Best Film and Best Director for Jonathan Glazer, but the film only went on to win Best International Feature and Best Sound at the 96th Academy Awards.
However, since 2000, its awards have correctly prognosticated Best Picture nominees, including wins for Kathryn Bigelow’s wartime bomb disposal drama “The Hurt Locker” (2009), Tom McCarthy’s look inside the unraveling of a Catholic Church scandal in “Spotlight” (2015), Barry Jenkins’ romantic triptych “Moonlight” (2016), Bong Joon-ho’s capitalistic satire/thriller “Parasite” (2019) and the Daniels’ multiverse drama “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022).
Its selections for Best Director are also strong forecasts of the Academy’s taste, as only one of its winners since 2009 — Debra Granik for the Ben Foster-starring “Leave No Trace” (2018) — has not subsequently received an Oscar nomination in that category. In that time, the Best Director Oscar has been claimed by six of LACFA’s Best Director winners, including Bigelow, Alfonso Cuarón for his technologically-groundbreaking “Gravity,” Guillermo del Toro for his dark romance “The Shape of Water,” Director Bong for “Parasite,” Chloé Zhao for her spiritual road film “Nomadland,” and Jane Campion for her pyschosexual Western “The Power of the Dog.”
2024 marks the 50th anniversary of LAFCA’s inception and the third year for gender-neutral acting categories by the critics’ group. Keep reading below to find out all of this year’s winners.
Best Picture:
Runner-up:
Director:
Runner-up:
Leading Performances:
Runners-up:
Supporting Performances:
Runners-up:
Screenplay:
Runner up:
Cinematography: Jomo Fray, “Nickel Boys”
Runner-up: Lol Crawley, “The Brutalist”
Editing:
Runner-up:
Production Design:
Runner-up:
Music/Score: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Challengers”
Runner-up: Eiko Ishibashi, “Evil Does Not Exist”
Foreign Language:
Runner-up:
Documentary/Non-Fiction Film:
Runner-up:
New Generation Award:
Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Prize:
Career Achievement Award: John Carpenter