The 36th edition of The Gothams has a five-film group at the front of its nominations tally. All of a Sudden, Clarissa, La Gradiva, The Invite and Tender Loving Care received four nominations apiece across the awards’ 11 categories.
The nominations cover 42 feature films and 25 individual performances. That breadth is important: the leaders are not all competing in precisely the same lanes. Clarissa and The Invite appear in Best Feature, while All of a Sudden, La Gradiva and Tender Loving Care are represented in Best International Feature. Their four-nomination totals instead emerge from combinations of film, directing, writing and acting recognition.
The result is a slate that offers no single clean front-runner from the information currently available. A nomination total shows how widely a film has landed with voters across categories, but it is not itself a prediction of a winner. The clearest practical takeaway is that these five titles have multiple routes to leave an imprint on the ceremony.
The five films with four nominations
Clarissa, directed by Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri, is nominated for Best Feature, Best Adapted Screenplay for Chuko Esiri, Outstanding Lead Performance for Sophie Okonedo and Breakthrough Performer for India Amarteifio. It is distributed by NEON.
The Invite, directed by Olivia Wilde, takes a Best Feature nomination alongside Best Adapted Screenplay recognition for Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. Penélope Cruz is nominated in Outstanding Supporting Performance, and the film is also among the titles selected for the Gotham Audience Award. A24 is attached to the film.
All of a Sudden, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, is in the Best International Feature race and gives Hamaguchi nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Tao Okamoto is nominated for Outstanding Supporting Performance. NEON is attached.
La Gradiva carries nominations for Best International Feature, Breakthrough Director for Marine Atlan, Best Original Screenplay for Atlan and Anne Brouillet, and Breakthrough Performer for Colas Quignard. The film is attached to 1-2 Special.
Tender Loving Care, from director Mike Leigh, is nominated for Best International Feature, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Outstanding Supporting Performance for Kate O’Flynn. Bleecker Street is attached.
For readers tracking awards terminology, the screenplay split matters. Original screenplay means the category recognizes a script presented as an original work for these awards; adapted screenplay is the separate category for screenplays treated as adaptations. The nominations list identifies which category each work is competing in, but does not detail the underlying source material for individual films. Similarly, “lead,” “supporting” and “breakthrough” are distinct performance classifications, not a ranking of one actor’s work over another.
Best Feature: 11 nominated films
Clarissa and The Invite face nine other films in Best Feature: Club Kid, The Debut, Dreams in Nightmares, Josephine, Mouse, Paper Tiger, Primetime, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.
The list also establishes a notable pattern in how the slate is distributed among companies. A24 is attached to Club Kid, The Debut, The Invite and Primetime. NEON is attached to Clarissa and Paper Tiger. The remainder spans Lunette Films, Sumerian Pictures, Independent Film Company, MUBI and Amazon MGM Studios.
The Best Feature nominees and credited directors are:
- Clarissa — Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri
- Club Kid — Jordan Firstman
- The Debut — Jesse Eisenberg
- Dreams in Nightmares — Shatara Michelle Ford
- The Invite — Olivia Wilde
- Josephine — Beth de Araújo
- Mouse — Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson
- Paper Tiger — James Gray
- Primetime — Lance Oppenheim
- Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — Jane Schoenbrun
- Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother — Bassam Tariq
The Best Feature field intersects with several individual categories. Okonedo’s lead-performance nomination and Amarteifio’s breakthrough-performer nomination broaden Clarissa’s presence. The Invite has Cruz in supporting performance. Julianne Moore is nominated in lead performance for The Debut; Adam Driver is a supporting nominee for Paper Tiger; Skyler Gisondo is a supporting nominee for Primetime; and Adia is a breakthrough performer nominee for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.
International Feature and the director race
Best International Feature contains 10 nominated films: All of a Sudden, Ben’Imana, Blue Heron, Everytime, Fatherland, Filipiñana, La Gradiva, Minotaur, Possible Love and Tender Loving Care.
Five of those directors are also named in Best Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi for All of a Sudden, Sandra Wollner for Everytime, Andrey Zvyagintsev for Minotaur, Jane Schoenbrun for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Mike Leigh for Tender Loving Care. Schoenbrun is the one director in that group whose film is in Best Feature rather than Best International Feature.
This overlap is useful context, but it should not be overstated. It demonstrates that several filmmakers were recognized both for a particular film’s overall placement and for direction. It does not say that all Best International Feature nominees are in contention for Best Director, nor that a Best Director nomination determines the feature winner.
The Breakthrough Director category has six nominees: Sophy Romvari for Blue Heron, Jordan Firstman for Club Kid, Aleshea Harris for Is God Is, Marine Atlan for La Gradiva, Joel Alfonso Vargas for Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), and John Early for Maddie’s Secret. Atlan’s placement adds another layer to La Gradiva’s four-nomination run.
Writing, documentary and performance contenders
The original-screenplay nominees are Everytime by Sandra Wollner; La Gradiva by Marine Atlan and Anne Brouillet; Possible Love by Lee Chang-dong and Oh Jung-mi; Tender Loving Care by Mike Leigh; and Wild Horse Nine by Martin McDonagh.
The adapted-screenplay group consists of All of a Sudden by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Clarissa by Chuko Esiri, The Invite by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, Minotaur by Simon Lyashenko and Andrey Zvyagintsev, and Primetime by Ajon Singh.
Documentary Feature recognizes Closure, A Fox Under a Pink Moon, NAZA, Once Upon a Time in Harlem and You Can See Everything. The last of these, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, also appears in the Gotham Audience Award lineup.
The Outstanding Lead Performance nominees are Mahershala Ali for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Gillian Anderson for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jeon Do-yeon for Possible Love, John Early for Maddie’s Secret, John Malkovich for Wild Horse Nine, Ian McKellen for The Christophers, Julianne Moore for The Debut, Sophie Okonedo for Clarissa, Andrew Scott for Elsinore, and John Turturro for The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.
Outstanding Supporting Performance includes Tom Courtenay for Queen at Sea, Esmé Creed-Miles for Sense and Sensibility, Cruz for The Invite, Driver for Paper Tiger, Andrew Garfield for Artificial, Gisondo for Primetime, Sandra Hüller for Fatherland, O’Flynn for Tender Loving Care, Okamoto for All of a Sudden, and Channing Tatum for Josephine.
The Audience Award adds a separate viewer-facing race
The Gothams have also brought back the Audience Award. Its eight nominees are Backrooms, La Bola Negra, The Drama, The Invite, Michael, Obsession, Project Hail Mary and You Can See Everything.
That category should be read separately from the juried nomination totals elsewhere in the slate. Its presence gives The Invite a fourth category of visibility in the program, while You Can See Everything crosses from Documentary Feature into the audience field. It also means the awards are acknowledging a collection of titles beyond the Best Feature and Best International Feature lineups.
For more entertainment coverage outside the awards circuit, see our report on the Off-Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s Rumors.
With the nominations now set, the principal story is less a dominant single title than a clustered field. Clarissa, The Invite, All of a Sudden, La Gradiva and Tender Loving Care each have four recognized opportunities, but they arrive there through markedly different category mixes. That leaves feature, international, writing, directing, performance and audience honors all carrying distinct weight as the 36th Gothams unfold.
