2022 Gotham Awards Nominations

Tár does have its detractors. They’re overwhelmingly outnumbered by the film’s admirers, but they are committed. Writing for Artforum, Amy Taubin calls Tár “imbecilic and carelessly racist,” and she elaborates on that in a recent conversation with Nicolas Rapold. For the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, Tár is “a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics” and “looks at any social station and way of life besides the money-padded and the pristinely luxurious as cruddy, filthy, pathetic.”

But most reviewers would agree with 4Columns film editor Melissa Anderson. “That Tár, for the most part, engages intelligently with highly charged sociopolitical issues that have fueled innumerable idiotic think pieces is just one of its many pleasing surprises,” she writes. “That this wholly original, effortlessly lofty film is by Field—an actor turned writer-director whose previous two features, Little Children (2006) and In the Bedroom (2001), were muddled literary adaptations of middle-class malaise and anguish in New England—is another. Tár’s greatest pleasure, though, may be its casting.”

Field’s troupe is led, of course, by Cate Blanchett, who won a Best Actress Volpi Cup in Venice for her portrayal of the brilliant and demanding orchestra conductor Lydia Tár. Now she’s up for a Gotham for Outstanding Lead Performance, and Nina Hoss, who plays Lydia’s first violinist and romantic partner, and Noémie Merlant, who plays her assistant, are nominated for Outstanding Supporting Performance awards. Tár’s other two nominations are for Field’s screenplay and Best Feature.

The five films in that category are Tár, Aftersun, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral—“a movie filled with restrained feeling and shimmers of beauty,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, “spare, precise, formally rigorous”—and Juan Pablo González’s Dos Estaciones. At Sundance, Teresa Sánchez won a Special Jury Award for her performance as the proprietor of a tequila factory in Dos Estaciones, but the committees made up of critics and programmers that select Gotham nominees have not put her name on their list.

Other nominations in the acting categories include Paul Mescal (Lead) and Frankie Corio (Breakthrough Performer), the young and troubled father and his eleven-year-old daughter in Aftersun; and Charlotte Wells is in the running for a Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award. Michelle Yeoh (Lead) and Ke Huy Quan (Supporting) play the multiverse traveler and her husband in the Daniels’ Everything, by far the biggest box-office hit of all of this year’s Gotham nominees.

Oscar watchers are predicting that Danielle Deadwyler (Lead), who plays civil rights activist Mamie Till-Mobley in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, could give Blanchett a run for her money next spring. And the only actor to be nominated twice is Ben Whishaw, who has a shot at both Supporting (Women Talking) and Outstanding Performance in a New Series (This Is Going to Hurt).

Juries of writers, directors, actors, and others involved in the art and business of filmmaking will now have a full month to deliberate. The winners in twelve categories, including Best Documentary and Best International Feature, will be announced on November 28.