2022 Women Film Critic Circle Awards Winners
BEST MOVIE ABOUT WOMEN
She Said
BEST MOVIE BY A WOMAN
Women Talking – Sarah Polley
BEST WOMAN STORYTELLER (Screenwriting Award)
Sarah Polley – Women Talking
BEST ACTRESS
Michelle Yeoh – Everything Everywhere All at Once
BEST ACTOR
Brendan Fraser – The Whale
BEST FOREIGN FILM BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
Happening
BEST DOCUMENTARY BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
The Janes
BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande
BEST ANIMATED FEMALE
Meilin – Turning Red
BEST SCREEN COUPLE
Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All at Once
BEST TV SERIES
The Handmaid’s Tale
Yellowjackets
*ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD
Women Talking
*JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD
Till
*KAREN MORLEY AWARD
Women Talking
ACTING AND ACTIVISM AWARD
Geena Davis
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Rita Moreno
*ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Adrienne Shelly was a promising actress and filmmaker who was brutally strangled in her apartment in 2006 at the age of forty by a construction worker in the building, after she complained about noise. Her killer tried to cover up his crime by hanging her from a shower rack in her bathroom, to make it look like suicide. He later confessed that he was having a “bad day.” Shelly, who left behind a baby daughter, had just completed her film Waitress, which she also starred in, and which was honored at Sundance after her death.
*JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: The daughter of a laundress and a musician, Baker overcame being born black, female and poor, and marriage at age fifteen, to become an internationally acclaimed legendary performer, starring in the films Princess Tam Tam, Moulin Rouge and Zou Zou. She also survived the race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois as a child, and later expatriated to France to escape US racism. After participating heroically in the underground French Resistance during WWII, Baker returned to the US where she was a crusader for racial equality. Her activism led to attacks against her by reporter Walter Winchell who denounced her as a communist, leading her to wage a battle against him. Baker was instrumental in ending segregation in many theaters and clubs, where she refused to perform unless integration was implemented.
*KAREN MORLEY AWARD: Karen Morley was a promising Hollywood star in the 1930s, in such films as Mata Hari and Our Daily Bread. She was driven out of Hollywood for her leftist political convictions by the Blacklist and for refusing to testify against other actors, while Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden were informants against her. And also for daring to have a child and become a mother, unacceptable for female stars in those days. Morley maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.
