‘The Zone of Interest’ and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Top List of 2023 TFCA Award Winners

Big congrats are in order for the winners – and runner-ups too, it’s an honour just to be nominated etc. – of the 27th annual Toronto Film Critics Association awards.

The TFCA is a group of well-known Toronto-based movie critics – some of whom regularly contribute to Zoomer or sit on festival juries in Cannes, Berlin, Venice and, of course, at TIFF.

Since 1998, the group has awarded hefty cash prizes to the best of the best of the year in film. And this year – drumroll please – historical drama The Zone of Interest, about a Nazi raising his family near next to Auschwitz, won both Best Picture and Best Director for English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. The TFCA winners don’t overlap as much as you’d think with the Academy Awards, but this year could be an exception since The Zone of Interest is currently leading the Oscar race.

Hot on its tail, however, is 81-year-old Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, whose DiCaprio-adjacent lead (that’s no easy task) Lily Gladstone was the TFCA’s Outstanding Lead Performance winner.

 

 

Notice they didn’t say “Best Actress”? That’s because this year the TFCA took a big brave step into the future and eliminated gender-based “actor and actress” categories with a pair of genderless prizes – something most every award show is surely considering.

Gladstone’s co-winner for Outstanding Lead Performance was German actor Sandra Hüller, who won for her role as the accused in French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall.

Outstanding Supporting Performance winners, meanwhile, are Broadway-turned-screen actor Da’Vine Joy Randolph in the buzzy dramedy The Holdovers and Canadian heartthrob Ryan Gosling for his role as Ken in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. The latter, a $1.4 billion dollar blockbuster, also nabbed the TFCA’s Best Original Screenplay honour with its pink clutch, while Best Adapted Screenplay went to Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth. (Sorry, Christopher Nolan, whose Oppenheimer earned a TFCA nod to Robert Downey Jr. but nothing else.)

 

 

While we know most of the winners in advance, the Toronto Film Critics Association does keep a few secrets to be revealed at next year’s gala held at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel. TFCA members already voted in December, but the rest of us will have to wait until March to learn the big big winner: Best Canadian director, a $100,000 purse sponsored by Rogers.

This year, to better reflect the ever-changing filmmaking landscape, Rogers chopped their award right down the middle to be shared between Best Canadian Film and Best Canadian Documentary. Blackberry, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person and SOLO are competing for the former; the latter’s got Rojek, Someone Lives Here and Swan Song in the highly-competitive race. Fun fact: Sarah Polley has scored the purse twice in this lifetime: first for 2007’s Away from Her and then again for Stories We Tell in 2014.

The star-studded gala will be hosted by Orphan Black and The Handmaid’s Tale actor Amanda Brugel, who’s back for more after hosting last year. Famous faces in the crowd included Tantoo Cardinal, Clement Virgo and Rick Mercer.

You can view the entire list of 2023 TFCA award winners on the group’s website.

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