Gotham Award Winners 2019: Marriage Story Wins Top Prize

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‘Marriage Story’ Earns Four Gotham Awards Including Best Picture

By Matt Goldberg

Published Dec 3, 2019

The awards race is underway.

Last night the Gotham Awards were handed out. The Gothams are unique in that journalists pick the nominees but the winners are chosen by a panel of five actor actors and/or filmmakers. As a barometer of future success, it’s a bit narrow. For example, last year’s Best Feature winner, The Rider, wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, nor was its selection for Best Actor (Ethan Hawke for First Reformed) or Best Actress (Toni Collette for Hereditary). That doesn’t mean the Gothams don’t have value, but rather it’s the start of a very long awards season and the Academy has only become more unpredictable as its membership has diversified.

With all that in mind, last night’s big winner was Marriage Story, which won Best Feature, Best Screenplay (Noah Baumbach), Best Actor (Adam Driver), and the Audience Award. Does this mean that Marriage Story could take off this awards season? Possibly, but keep in mind that Netflix is also pushing The Irishman heavily and that seems to have more buzz right now than Marriage Story, although that could certainly change once Baumbach’s movie hits the streaming service on Friday.

So what does this mean for the awards race? It’s difficult to say. New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association will be weighing in soon plus we’ll have the Golden Globe nominees (although you can buy off the HFPA easily, so those don’t really count), and it will be interesting to see who emerges as a front-runner and if it even matters. It’s not like Green Book made a run in the critics awards last year but it still ended up as the Best Picture winner, so who knows.