Whatever misgivings the Hollywood Establishment may have about Netflix, they are apparently not shared by the critical class. Roma was the big winner at Thursday’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards , earning honors in Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. It didn’t take home Best Foreign Language Film at the NYFCC or the National Board of Review, but paradoxically, that might be a sign of the movie’s overall strength: Voters have so many other places to reward the film that they may have felt comfortable giving some shine to the lesser-known Cold War . The film’s handicaps in the Best Picture race are well-known — it’s Netflix, it’s black-and-white, it’s foreign-language — and I’m also curious how such an auteur-driven movie will play with actors, the largest branch of the Academy. But the preferential ballot should help: It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t at least *like* Roma.

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Green Book

As the supposed crowd-pleaser in this year’s Best Picture race, Green Book got a shock when the crowds didn’t show. Amid a swirl of criticism over its racial politics, the movie pulled in only $7 million in its Thanksgiving-weekend wide release, prompting our own Mark Harris to ask who Green Book was for. On Tuesday, we got our answer: the National Board of Review, who named it the best film of the year, and gave Viggo Mortensen the Best Actor prize. That body’s tastes have run toward the middlebrow recently — The Post earned top honors last year — but the movie clearly still has its backers. Defenders like Variety’s Owen Gleiberman and AwardsDaily’s Sasha Stone have been pushing against what they see as an overly “woke” backlash, but with the preferential ballot rewards consensus, and like La La Land and Three Billboards before it, it’s possible that Green Book may simply be too polarizing to triumph in Best Picture.