During a normal year, when many of the awards-contending movies are released late in the season, home viewers often have to wait for a month or two to catch the winners on various streaming services. But the one benefit to an awards show during a pandemic year is that all the winners are immediately available — or so we might have assumed.
To the surprise of many Golden Globes prognosticators — and to the actress herself — Jodie Foster won best supporting actress for The Mauritanian, a 9/11-themed legal drama that’s currently in theaters, but will arrive on VOD on Tuesday, March 2nd. (Our critic, Jeannette Catsoulis, would advise you to proceed with caution.) Otherwise, the night’s big winners on the film side are scattered among the streaming giants, with Nomadland and The United States vs. Billie Holiday on Hulu, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm on Amazon Prime and The Trial of the Chicago 7, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and I Care a Lot on Netflix.
The awards were not distributed quite so democratically for the TV slate, where the fourth season of Netflix’s “The Crown” took best drama as well as prizes for three of the four acting categories. Netflix also has The Queen’s Gambit,” which won for best limited series or TV movie and for Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance as an American chess grandmaster of humble origins. And the service is streaming all six seasons of the best musical or comedy winner “Schitt’s Creek.”
Here’s a guide to the major-category winners that are currently a click away, along with excerpts from their New York Times reviews or features.
Movies
Nomadland
Won for: Best picture, drama; best director
“In a fine Emersonian spirit, the movie rebels against its own conventional impulses, gravitating toward an idea of experience that is more complicated, more open-ended, more contradictory than what most American movies are willing to permit.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Won for: Best musical or comedy; best actor, musical or comedy
“Would I call this the best movie of 2020, from the standpoint of cinematic art? Look, I don’t know. It’s been a weird year. But I would insist that this sequel to a cringey, pranky, 14-year-old classic is undeniably the most 2020 movie of all time.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime.
The Trial of the Chicago 7
Won for: Best screenplay
“‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ is a mixed bag. While [Aaron] Sorkin draws some of his dialogue from court transcripts, he also exercises the historical dramatist’s prerogative to embellish, streamline and invent. Some of the liberties he takes help to produce a leaner, clearer story, while others serve no useful purpose.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Won for: Best actor, drama
“Of course it’s hard to watch Levee — to marvel at [Chadwick] Boseman’s lean and hungry dynamism — without feeling renewed shock and grief at Boseman’s death earlier this year. And though ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ has been around for a long while and will endure in the archive, the algorithm and the collective memory, there is something especially poignant about encountering it now.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
The United States vs. Billie Holiday
Won for: Best actress, drama
“Andra Day, who plays Holiday, is a canny and charismatic performer, and the film’s hectic narrative is punctuated with nightclub and concert-hall scenes that capture some of the singer’s magnetism. Rather than lip-sync the numbers, Day sings them in a voice that has some of Holiday’s signature breathy rasp and delicate lilt, and suggests her ability to move from whimsy to anguish and back in the space of a phrase.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
I Care a Lot
Won for: Best actress, musical or comedy
“An unexpectedly gripping thriller that seesaws between comedy and horror, “I Care a Lot” is cleverly written (by the director, J Blakeson) and wonderfully cast. Marla is an almost cartoonish sociopath, and [Rosamund] Pike leans into her villainy with unwavering bravado.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Judas and the Black Messiah
Won for: Best supporting actor
“‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ represents a disciplined, impassioned effort to bring clarity to a volatile moment, to dispense with the sentimentality and revisionism that too often cloud movies about the ’60s and about the politics of race.”
Where to watch: Stream it on HBO Max.
Soul
Won for: Best animated film; best score
“Though other Pixar projects have visited actual places (Paris, San Francisco, the Great Barrier Reef), this is the first to dive fully into the multisensory moods of a living city, chasing after its rhythms, its folkways, its architectural details. “Soul” is a movie about death, about jazz, about longing and limitation. It’s also a New York movie.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Disney+.
Minari
Won for: Best foreign-language film
“It all seems simple and straightforward. ‘Minari’ is modest, specific and thrifty, like the lives it surveys. There’s nothing small about it, though, because it operates at the true scale of life.”
Where to watch: Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.
TV
The Crown
Won for: Best drama; best actress, drama; best actor, drama; best supporting actress
“Corrin’s portrayal of Diana has impressed British critics, and those who knew the princess have also voiced their praise. Andrew Morton, who worked with Diana on an explosive 1992 biography, told Vanity Fair, ‘I think Emma Corrin’s performance is far and away the most accomplished and realistic portrayal of Diana I have seen.’”
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Schitt’s Creek
Won for: Best musical or comedy; best actress, musical or comedy
“Thanks to a daffy charm — a winning combination of its characters’ caustic wit and the show’s fundamental warmth — and enthusiastic word-of-mouth support, the series rose from humble origins to the pinnacle of TV acclaim.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix and Hulu.
The Queen’s Gambit
Won for: Best limited series or TV movie; best actress, limited series or TV movie
“[The writer-director Scott] Frank wraps it all up in a package that’s smart, smooth and snappy throughout, like finely tailored goods. The production has a canny combination of retro Rat Pack style, in its décors and music choices, with a creamy texture, in its performances and cinematography, that is reminiscent of another Netflix period piece, ‘The Crown.’”
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
I Know This Much Is True
Won for: Best actor, limited series or TV movie
“The new HBO mini-series ‘I Know This Much Is True’ takes a character and puts him through a wringer that is so unforgiving, you’d expect it to flatten him completely, to squeeze out everything but the allegory of suffering. That it doesn’t — that there’s enough juice in him to keep you moderately interested for most of the six-hour-plus story — is almost entirely thanks to the man playing him, Mark Ruffalo.”
Where to watch: Stream it on HBO Max.
Ted Lasso
Won for: Best actor, musical or comedy
“In its relentless positivity and commitment to making its audience comfortable while maintaining a sheen of pop-cult knowingness, ‘Ted Lasso’ is the dad pants of sitcoms. It contains some of the foul language and snickering sexual humor that streaming allows, but they’re an excuse for Sudeikis to goggle his eyes and purse his lips in a way that says Lasso is wholesome enough to notice but cool enough not to make a thing out of it.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Apple TV+.
Small Axe
Won for: Best supporting actor
“That the entirety of ‘Small Axe’ feels profoundly personal is no surprise. That moments from its component parts leap from the screen with crackling recognition has perhaps less to do with the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement than with the authenticity and heart of the filmmaking.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime.