The Los Angeles Film Critics Association named Sean Baker’s “Anora” its Best Picture for 2024. The critics group also awarded stars Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov with the Best Leading Performance and Best Supporting Performance, respectively. This year, the LAFCA decided to spread the wealth and awarded two performers in each category, which remain gender neutral.
The LAFCA spread the wealth around, but Baker also received the runner-up prizes for both Best Director and Best Screenplay. Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” was named runner-up in the Best Picture category.
With New York kicking off awards season with the Gotham Awards and the NYFCC releasing their winners, the West coast finally jumped into the fray, with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association announcing their winners for 2024 on Sunday, December 8.
LAFCA previously 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.”
2025 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: “Anora”
Runner-up: “The Brutalist”
Director: Mohammad Rasoulof, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”
Runner-up: Sean Baker, “Anora”
Leading Performances: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, “Hard Truths,” and Mikey Madison, “Anora”
Runners-up: Demi Moore, “The Substance” and Fernanda Torres, “I’m Still Here”
Supporting Performances: Yura Borisov, “Anora,”and Kieran Culkin, “A Real Pain”
Runners-up: Clarence Maclin, “Sing Sing,” and Adam Pearson, “A Different Man”
Screenplay: Jesse Eisenberg, “A Real Pain”
Runner-up: Sean Baker, “Anora”
Best Animation: “Flow”
Runner-up: “Chicken for Linda”
Cinematography: Jomo Fray, “Nickel Boys”
Runner-up: Lol Crawley, “The Brutalist”
Editing: *Tie* Nicholas Monsour, “Nickel Boys,” and Hansjörg Weißbrich, “September 5”
Production Design: Judy Becker, “The Brutalist”
Runner-up: Adam Stockhausen, “Blitz”
Music/Score: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Challengers”
Runner-up: Eiko Ishibashi, “Evil Does Not Exist”
Film Not in the English Language: “All We Imagine as Light”
Runner-up: “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”
Documentary/Non-Fiction Film: “No Other Land”
Runner-up: “Dahomey”
New Generation Award: Vera Drew for “The People’s Joker”
Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Prize: “The Human Surge 3,” Eduardo Williams
Career Achievement Award: John Carpenter
