See the complete Critics Choice Awards 2026 winners list. Timothée Chalamet, Jessie Buckley, Jacob Elordi & top film and TV performances honored.
If you caught the 31st Annual Critics Choice Awards 2026 on January 4, you saw that the atmosphere at the Barker Hangar was not just about bright lights and glamour. For the fourth year in a row, the night was hosted by Chelsea Handler and it seemed less like a celebratory back slap and more like a nod to hard work.
Whether it was 12-hour makeup sessions or five-minute television episodes, the winners this year didn’t only act, they suffered. The message from the Critics Choice Association (CCA) was loud and clear: in 2026, the line between technical risk and extraordinary physical commitment is where the industry’s attention lies.
(Best Actor Winner)
The weepy Timothée Chalamet as Brooding Heartthrob, Desert Messiah in Dune is not who Marty Supreme is at all, he’s fully reimagined himself. Chalamet Won Best Actor for portraying a 1950s ping-pong wunderkind based on the real life Marty Reisman.
But this was about more than whacking a ball back and forth. He was described as having a “singularly enervating intensity”. Marty was not a sportsman, but a hustler—a guy who could talk some unbeatable nonsense, who could pair swagger with geeky glasses, and who was so engulfed in his need to win that he was willing to try anything. It was a kinetic, fizzy, electrified turn, the kind that reassures you he can fill a film with their souls alone, and in pure physical comedy.
(Best Actress Winner)
If Chalamet delivered the energy, Jessie Buckley delivered the tears. Taking home Best Actress for her portrayal of Agnes (Shakespeare’s wife) in Hamnet, Buckley gave what could be the most gut-wrenching performance of the year.
The storyline deals with the loss of her child, Hamnet, and the sorrows that led to Hamlet. Buckley’s performance was said to be “a privilege to watch.” She never merely portrayed a historical figure; she captured the raw, earth-shattering agony of a mother fighting to keep her life intact. It was a quiet, powerful turn that stood out against flashier roles, proving that sometimes the loudest emotions are the ones spoken in whispers.
(Best Supporting Actor Winner)
Jacob Elordi is now officially more than just a teen heartthrob. Awarded Best Supporting Actor for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Elordi achieved the impossible: he brought us to tears over a monster.1 His role wasn’t about scary make-up or snarling. He reputedly studied Butoh (a Japanese “dance of darkness”) in order to capture the creature’s motions, make such a physicality that was at once a terrifying and sincerely moving figure.
He portrayed the Monster not as a villain, but as an acting soul imprisoned in a grotesque body, one who was turned away from by his maker. It was a “physical” act- ing, in the widest sense — using his back, his shoulders and his eyes as well as his voice.
(Best Supporting Actress Winner)
The lack of appreciation for horror at awards shows makes Amy Madigan’s victory for Best Supporting Actress all the more gratifying. In the surprise hit Weapons as Aunt Gladys, a figure who immediately became a horror icon.
Madigan, a 75-year-old seasoned actress, said she was astonished by the win, she thought people would just “dig” the movie – not fall in love with “terrifying” her character. She teetered between a kooky, eccentric senior citizen and a predatory natural force. To be the most frightening person at the party and be so hypnotically watchable is a rare achievement, and the reviews strongly confirmed that.
We may as well not speak of winners without mentioning the night’s biggest—err, biggest champion? Paul Thomas Anderson won both Best Picture and Best Director for One Battle After Another.
The film is densely plotted, an “exquisitely detailed fantasy” about former revolutionaries meeting to rescue a daughter. It’s political and personal and very, very complex – and well, that’s just what the critics called the masterpiece of resistance and hope. I mean it’s not just the one actor here, it’s a conductor (Anderson) behind the wheel of an orchestra of stellar performers (including Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor) who create the best film of the year.
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| Category | Winner | Show | Key Context |
| Best Drama | The Pitt | HBO Max | Medical realism meets pandemic trauma. |
| Best Actor | Noah Wyle | The Pitt | A return to form with “urgent” authenticity. |
| Best Actress | Rhea Seehorn | Pluribus | Sci-Fi nuance; playing a resistor in a hive-mind. |
| Best Limited Series | Adolescence | Netflix | A technical feat of one-shot storytelling. |
Perhaps the most heartening bit from the 31st Critics Choice Awards is that “Genre isn’t a slur anymore. ”Horror and Sci-Fi, two genres long neglected at awards time, dominated the discussion.
The 2026 ceremony wasn’t about the speeches (though Noah Wyle’s tribute to healthcare workers was a tear-jerker), it was about the work. The Critics Choice Association took risks in its rewards. They watched Chalamet playing ping-pong half-blind, Elordi starving in a makeup chair, Stephen Graham doing a one-hour monologue in a single take and thought: This is the bar now.
As we head toward the Oscars, one thing is clear: The industry is turning its back on polished perfection and embracing a gritty, sweaty, technically dazzling brand of realism.
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Find out how Peacemaker Season 2 ends on a heartbreaking note. Jennifer Holland reveals the emotional finale that sets up James Gunn's new DC Universe.
Peacemaker Season 2 Episode 8 Full Nelson brought a rare achievement in genre TV, it provided a gratifying emotional payoff for the central characters that also ended with an apocalyptic, brink- of- war cliffhanger with ramifications for the entire DC Universe. This narrative paradox is exactly the reason why star Jennifer Holland, who plays Emilia Harcourt, referred to everything as “heartbreaking in retrospect”. Her appraisal captures the uneasy duality of James Gunn’s filmmaking in which real emotional breakthroughs are all too often punished by the brutal requirements of survival and franchise restructuring.
While the final episode was more focused on “smaller, character moments” that were designed to provide emotional closure, it also featured critical, major revelations that shaped the DCU. The perceived heartbreak is because Holland’s character, Emilia Harcourt, and her team, the “11th Street Kids” believe Chris Smith/Peacemaker (John Cena) gave himself up to A.R.G.U.S.. Holland later spoke about the emotional torment of this scenario, in particular discussing the “heartbreak of none of them knowing that Chris was kidnapped”.
The resulting effect is one of supreme narrative irony. The season expertly resolved the emotional complexity between Chris and Harcourt. Harcourt, who is defined by her trauma and fear of intimacy, actually exposed herself. But the external story cruelly supplants that hard won trust with the heavy gravity of perceived abandonment. The team manages to bail Chris out of prison, only to learn he’s already gone. They are to surmise that Chris went and left them immediately after their connecting on such an emotional level. This isn’t the grief of mourning a death, but the pain of a betrayal, maximizing the tragic payoff, and ensuring that Harcourt’s future arc will be driven by this unexpurgated pain and misunderstanding.
The near-fatal shooting Harcourt suffered in the Season 1 finale (during the battle with the Butterflies at Coverdale Ranch) left the character deeply scarred both physically and mentally, setting up her complicated return in Season 2. “The Harcourt and Peacemaker tension is very personal trauma,” Holland explained. After her near-death experience, Harcourt came back, according to Holland, “not operating the way she” was, still pushing people away as a mental defense mechanism. The whole of season 2 was about gradually tearing those walls down to nothing, so the final banishment is a particularly vitriolic reward for her emotional journey.
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Now, in a flashback sequence, the storyline finally gave us the truth about the hinted-at “night on the boat,” which served as crucial motivation behind their secretive relationship. The sequence allowed Chris and Harcourt, as DC Comics rivals, to commiserate over professional frustrations at the DC Comics sandwich shop Big Belly Burger, and together they stumble upon a bizarre 90s rock trivia question: a “rock cruise” with the band Nelson. Two enjoyed what was called a “magical, world-shattering, panoramic kiss.” This was, without a doubt, a “pivotal turning point” for their relationship.
The finale’s structure was ultimately defined by the necessity of setting up DCU Chapter One: Gods and Monsters. Regarding a potential third season, Gunn was clear it was not planned “at the moment,” stating: “This is about the wider DCU and other stories this will play out right now.”
Gunn said the Season 2 finale specifically aims to “set up the world of the 2027 DCU cinematic feature, Man of Tomorrow“. As DC Studios co-CEO, Gunn said his focus is “propping up and maintaining and repositioning the big diamond properties that DC has,” like Batman and Superman, but also taking lesser-known characters such as Peacemaker — and creating new “diamond properties” within the franchise.
This demand was why the final episode felt like an “extended teaser” or “backdoor pilot for other DCU projects,” as some critics observed. The narrative goal of the end of Season 2 was assimilation, not resolution. Tying up the Salvation cliffhanger in a third season of the TV show may have conflicted with or undermined the timeline set out in the slate of movie. When they left Chris to perish, his rescue, and what that would mean for him, had to happen in a big DCU event, and that meant the TV series prologue to the films. Although Gunn is still tight-lipped on whether Peacemaker will make an appearance in Man of Tomorrow or Supergirl, he has dropped a hint that Chris Smith’s next outing in the cinematic universe is a safe bet.
Jennifer Holland’s characterization of the Peacemaker Season 2 finale as “heartbreaking in retrospect” is a wonderful encapsulation of the narrative needs the series is forced to cater to with the wider franchise restructuring. The heartbreak is not just the breach of physical separation between Peacemaker and Harcourt but that their emotional walls are torn down only for the new connection to be severed by perceived betrayal. While Peacemaker Season 3 is on hold, the characters’ narratives—now driven by Harcourt’s grief and resolve—are officially at the center of the upcoming cinematic universe.
Explore Blue Moon (2025), Linklater's poignant film on art, loss, and time, featuring Ethan Hawke's career-defining portrayal of Lorenz Hart.
Richard Linklater is known for his temporal distortions, which he often varies over the course of decades, as in the Before trilogy or Boyhood. But in his 2025 magnum opus, Blue Moon, he does something radically different. He condenses the crushing burden of an entire career going down the tubes into a single confining night in the bowels of Sardi’s restaurant.
This movie is not simply a biopic, it’s a chamber piece on the brutal architecture of artistic mourning. It is March 31, 1943, and with these words the film memorializes the end of the Jazz Age, which was immediately supplanted by the “golden age” of the musical theater.
The setup is ruinously straightforward. Lorenz “Larry” Hart (an electric Ethan Hawke), the brilliant, jaded lyricist half of the legendary Rodgers and Hart team, is holding up the bar at Sardi’s.
Just across the street, his one-time soul mate and partner, Richard Rodgers, is debuting Oklahoma! with another partner, Oscar Hammerstein II. Hart must wait in the limbo of the restaurant, the muted applause he can hear is the sound of him being made redundant.
Linklater has said the film “Deals with a trauma that is, in a way, two-fold.”
This is not just a business split, it’s an artistic divorce between two men who defined an era together. Rodgers, the practical puppet master, had to change in order to live, to detach himself from Hart’s chaotic alcoholism and revue-style wit to something more formal and honest. Hart, the poetic soul of the roaring twenties, was just abandoned.
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The brilliance of Blue Moon is that it knows how to wait. According to The Guardian, Linklater and Hawke had been thinking about this film for more than ten years. Linklater famously told Hawke years ago,
“I’ll wait 10 years,”
Knowing the actor had to age into the role. To play the battered, gnome-like figure of the 47-year-old Hart, a guy worn down by drink and depression, he had to lose his youthful boyishness.
That prolonged timeline gives the film a deep, lived-in sadness. We see Hart desperately go through the motions of his old self — flirting, quipping, drinking trying to drown out the scary fact that the society he helped shape has no use for him anymore. He derides the “corny” nostalgia of Oklahoma! and cannot understand why the audience’s preference has moved away from his urbane sophistication to simple country sweetness.
“We all think we’re gonna run the table forever but tastes can change,” Linklater says in the production notes.
That is the film’s haunting thesis. Blue Moon is a monument to the “loser” of historical change. It’s a beautiful, sad recognition that sometimes even the most brilliant cultural architects find themselves trapped in the past, watching the future being built just down the street without them.
Blue Moon isn’t merely a movie — it’s an elegy. Linklater creates a haunting reflection on change, mourning and the slow brutality of time. The film, anchored by Ethan Hawke’s brilliant performance, reminds us that even the most brilliant creative minds can quickly become relics. It’s a masterwork of stillness, sorrow and storytelling: a paean to those who made the past even as they watched the future speed by.
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