20th Century Fox

For only the 13th time in its 44-year history, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. (LAFCA) agreed with their New York counterparts when it named “Roma” as the Best Picture of the Year on Sunday. While Alfonso Cuaron won Best Cinematography for his intimate memoir, he had to settle for runner-up status in two other races. He lost Best Director to Debra Granik (“Leave No Trace”) and Best Film Editing (along with Adam Gough) to “Minding the Gap” cutters Joshua Altman and Bing Liu. In turn, Altman lost the Best Documentary award to “Shirkers.”

After a prolonged debate about category placement, this group of journos awarded Olivia Colman the Best Actress award for her portrayal of Queen Anne in “The Favourite.” Just hours before, their Chicago counterparts had bumped her down to supporting.

The L.A. crowd promoted her to the lead race and relegated the Chicago choice for Best Actress, Toni Collette (“Hereditary”), to runner-up status. With Colman unlikely to compete as featured at the Oscars, Regina King (“If Beale Street Could Talk”) is looking like a lock for Best Supporting Actress. She added the endorsement of the L.A. critics to the prizes she’s already picked up from their D.C., Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and Toronto brethren.

Ethan Hawke has now won Best Actor from six of the eight groups to date, adding the L.A. prize to those that he’s collected from the Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New York and Toronto critics. (Christian Bale impressed the Philadelphia critics while Bradley Cooper won over the D.C. crowd.)

The L.A. critics endorsed the decision of the Toronto critics to add a new name to the Supporting Actor line-up: Steven Yeun for the South Korean thriller “Burning,” which tied with “Shoplifters” for Best Foreign Language Film.

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These Southern Californians rarely agree with the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) but embraced their love of the animated feature “”Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”

Over the course of its history, LAFCA has proven to be an unreliable barometer of the eventual Oscar winners. Last year, the group foresaw the outcome of only three Academy Awards races including Best Director. However, they doubled their chances to get that one right by naming both eventual Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro for “The Shape of Water and Luca Guadagnino for “Call Me By Your Name,” which was their pick for Best Picture. The other double dippers were Best Original Screenplay (“Get Out”) and Best Film Editing (“Dunkirk”) .

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