Wednesday, January 22, 2025

2025 AARP Movies for Grownup Award Nominations

Best Picture
Conclave: Thrillers don’t come any smarter than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy screenwriter Peter Straughan’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ book about a ruthless game of thrones when the Pope dies and the Vatican authorities choose a successor.

Emilia Pérez: A lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) helps a cartel kingpin find a new life, a new name—and a new gender. Critic Bilge Ebiri called it “a cross between Mrs. Doubtfire and Sicario.”

Gladiator II: The sequel to the 2001 best picture Oscar winner features Denzel Washington, 69, as a rich man who supplies gory Roman games with gladiators.

September 5: Steven Spielberg’s 2005 Munich dramatized the hunt for the terrorists who struck the 1972 Munich Olympics, but this pulse-pounder directed by Tim Fehlbaum puts you in the minds of the ABC Sports crew that had to show it to the world.

A Complete Unknown: Timothée Chalamet plays the young Bob Dylan going electric, in a film that will electrify some fans and outrage others—but once upon a time, he looked so fine, didn’t he?
picture from the filming of the gladiator movie where two actors are laughing and the director is standing in the background

Best Director
Jacques Audiard, 72, Emilia Pérez: Who else had the audacity to make a musical that’s also a soap opera that’s also a tense crime drama?

Edward Berger, 54, Conclave: The director of the World War I epic All Quiet on the Western Front depicts a more secret battlefield: the inner sanctum of the Vatican.

Ridley Scott, 87, Gladiator II: The four-time Oscar-nominated director of Blade Runner is still slaying the competition in the Colosseum that is Hollywood.

Pedro Almodóvar, 75, The Room Next Door: In the Spanish master’s first feature film in English, old friends (Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, both 64) reunite after one is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

James Mangold, 60, A Complete Unknown: He immortalized Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, and now he has brought back the young Bob Dylan, along with the 1960s folk scene.

Best Actor
Colman Domingo, 55, Sing Sing: Acting opposite actual ex-convicts, Domingo plays a prisoner who joins a theater group that turns troubled lives around through drama.

Ralph Fiennes, 61, Conclave: Fiennes takes us into the soul of a man painfully interrogating his flawed fellow clergymen, and his own faith.

Daniel Craig, 56, Queer: In a psychedelic adaptation of William Burroughs’ ​autobiographical novel, the James Bond star plays a war vet who whisks his lover from Mexico to South America in search of a magic tea to enable him to read the guy’s mind and see if he cares about him.

Jude Law, 51, The Order: Law plays an FBI agent hunting a terrifying neo-Nazi gang in the remote Pacific Northwest. The story is ripped from real 1980s headlines.

Adrien Brody, 51, The Brutalist: His visionary architect character, a Holocaust survivor who makes his masterpiece in Pennsylvania, is haunted by the American Dream.

Best Actress
Demi Moore, 62, The Substance: She daringly plays an actress who takes a youth potion with horrific consequences (and biting commentary about ageism).

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, 57, Hard Truths: An Oscar nominee (Secrets & Lies, 1996), she plays a human tornado who vents her rage on everyone in her path, and her performance makes us feel where all that anger’s coming from.

June Squibb, 95, Thelma: At 84, she got an Oscar nomination for Nebraska. Now she aces her first lead role, as a phone-scam victim who—inspired by Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible—pursues the criminal. And she did her own stunts!

Nicole Kidman, 57, Babygirl: Kidman nails the role of a CEO who risks all for a sizzling fling with a 20-something intern (Harris Dickinson).

Pamela Anderson, 57, The Last Showgirl: The Baywatch veteran is seriously good as a Las Vegas dancer in hard times, defiantly shouting, “I’m 57, and I’m beautiful, you son of a bitch!” The Toronto International Film Festival audience went wild.

Best TV Series or Limited Series
Shōgun: The Emmy-hogging show about the 16th-century ruler who united Japan is a win for Hiroyuki Sanada, 64, its coproducer and titular star. He used to be known as the Tom Cruise of Japan. Now he’s the hottest new talent in Hollywood.

Hacks: Jean Smart, 73, kept her hit show fresh by reaching deeper into her stand-up comic character’s intergenerational love-hate relationship with her protégée (Hannah Einbinder).

The Crown: In the royal drama’s finale, Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville, 68) die, a melancholy, moving conclusion.

Slow Horses: Oscar winner Gary Oldman, 66; Oscar nominees Kristin Scott Thomas, 64; and Jonathan Pryce, 77, are superb. Nobody on TV has more fun than Oldman as the slovenly, exuberantly insulting boss of an underdog British spy team.

Palm Royale: Kristen Wiig, 51, is funny as a 1960s Florida social climber blocked by locals, but Carol Burnett is even better as a grande dame who speaks gibberish, yet makes her feelings known. Her performance made her, at 91, the oldest Emmy comedy actress nominee in history.

Movies for Grownups Career Achievement Winner: Glenn Close
Close proves that a Career Achievement winner need not be one gazing back on past glory (which in her case includes scads of major award nominations and wins). She starred in the 2024 Netflix horror hit The Deliverance and will be featured in both the upcoming Knives Out mystery Wake Up Dead Man and Ryan Murphy’s Hulu legal drama All’s Fair.

Best Supporting Actor
Peter Sarsgaard, September 5
Denzel Washington, Gladiator II
Guy Pearce, The Brutalist
Stanley Tucci, Conclave
Clarence Maclin, Sing Sing

Best Supporting Actress
Joan Chen, Didi
Isabella Rossellini, Conclave
Aunjanue Ellis, Nickel Boys
Lesley Manville, Queer
Connie Nielsen, Gladiator II

Best Screenwriter
Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Livecchi, Emilia Perez
Jay Cocks and James Mangold, A Complete Unknown
Peter Straughan, Conclave
Winnie Holzman, Wicked
Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, Dune: Part Two

Best Intergenerational Movie
Thelma
His Three Daughters
Didi
Here
The Piano Lesson

Best Ensemble
His Three Daughters
Sing Sing
A Complete Unknown
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice
September 5

Best Time Capsule
September 5
Maria
A Complete Unknown
Here
The Brutalist

Documentary
Will & Harper
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
I Am: Celine Dion
Luther: Never Too Much
Piece by Piece

Best Actor, Television
Idris Elba, Hijack
Gary Oldman, Slow Horses
Billy Crudup, The Morning Show
Hiroyuki Sanada, Shōgun
Jon Hamm, Fargo

Best Actress, Television
Jennifer Aniston, The Morning Show
Meryl Streep, Only Murders in the Building
Jodie Foster, True Detective: Night Country
Sofia Vergara, Griselda
Jean Smart, Hacks

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