'MAD MAX: FURY ROAD' Sweeps the 2015 Seattle Film Awards

This morning, the Seattle Film Critics’ Survery unleashed their winners and it was Mad Max: Fury Road who took the proverbial cake and ate it too. Curated by Should I See It‘s Mike Ward, the full press release is included below:

“George Miller’s post-apocalyptic epic Mad Max: Fury Road steamrolled the competition, and was named the Best Picture of 2015 by Seattle’s film community. The film nearly swept the competition, earning 10 out of a potential 11 award wins in the third annual Seattle Film Awards survey.
In addition to winning the city’s biggest prize of Best Picture, Miller took home Best Director honors, and the film added eight more awards, including Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing, Makeup & Hairstyling, Original Score, Production Design, Sound Design, and Visual Effects.

The dominance of Mad Max did not impact the acting races, which held a few surprises. For the second time in three years, Leonardo DiCaprio was named Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal as fur trapper Hugh Glass in The Revenant. DiCaprio earned Seattle’s Best Actor award in 2013 for The Wolf of Wall Street. Benicio del Toro won Best Supporting Actor recognition for his portrayal of a mysterious FBI agent in Denis Villenueve’s suspense/thriller Sicario.

Nina Hoss was named Best Actress in a Leading Role for the German film Phoenix, portraying a woman who is searching for her husband after undergoing facial reconstruction surgery in post-World War II Berlin. In perhaps the biggest surprise of the survey, Mya Taylor earned Best Supporting Actress honors for Sean Baker’s groundbreaking Tangerine. Taylor, a transgender female, portrays one of two best friends and transgender prostitutes, looking to find their former pimp on the streets of Los Angeles during a sunny Christmas Eve day.

Spotlight, a film many feel will be a considerable player in the upcoming Oscar race, provided Mad Max’s only setback, defeating the film in the Best Ensemble Cast category. This is the second year in a row that Michael Keaton has been a part of the Best Ensemble Cast winner, a lead actor in last year’s Ensemble winning Birdman.

The embracing of Mad Max: Fury Road left a number of films, with multiple nominations, empty-handed, including The Hateful Eight (6 nominations), Steve Jobs (5) and the movie event of the year, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (4). Best Picture nominees Brooklyn, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Martian and Room also were left without an award to call their own.

Science-fiction thriller Ex Machina earned writer/director Alex Garland a win for Best Original Screenplay. Carol, Phyllis Nagy’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel “The Price of Salt”, was awarded Best Adapted Screenplay. With 10 nominations in total, this represented Carol’s only victory.
Inside Out was named Best Animated Feature Film, while World War II drama Son of Saul, Hungary’s submission for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, earned that same recognition from Seattle’s film community. After capturing the Seattle Film Awards’ prize for Best Documentary Feature in 2013 for The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer’s similarly-themed follow up, The Look of Silence, won this year’s Best Documentary Feature Film award.

All of the winners of the 2015 Seattle Film Awards are listed below: