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The Set Decorators Society of America revealed its 2024 Sdsa Awards winners on Friday. The announcement was made live on the Set Decor YouTube page at 8 p.m. Et/5 p.m. Pt. A Complete Unknown won Best Film and Best Period Design even though it wasn’t nominated for Best Production Design at the 2025 Oscars.

Among the nominees were all five Oscar contenders for Best Production Design: The Brutalist, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, Nosferatu, and Wicked. The five Oscar nominees were split between four categories, avoiding a direct clash prior to the 2025 Oscars on March 2. Conclave prevailed in Contemporary against co-nominees Anora, Civil War, Emilia Pérez, and The Substance. In Fantasy/Sci-Fi, winner Beetlejuice Beetlejuice bested Alien: Romulus, Beetlejuice, Dune: Part Two, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and Megalopolis. In Comedy/Musical, Wicked soared to victory over Deadpool & Wolverine, Kinds of Kindness, Nightbitch, and Wolfs. The only two Oscar nominees...

Ben Whishaw again proves himself as the brilliant actor we all knew he was, if we were looking closely enough, in Ira Sachs’ “Peter Hujar’s Day.” The film, set in 1974 New York City, is an intimate two-hander starring just Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as gay photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, respectively. They gathered, it’s true, on a cold day in December, where Hujar recounts all the events of the previous one, which involved photo opportunities with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and a lot of quotidian nothingness. But those small moments of a day grow profound as Peter’s winding monologue wears on. Writer/director Sachs’ extraordinary new movie never breaks from the pair, and at times becomes like a documentary about the greatness of the actors themselves, Mozart possessing the soundtrack as Sachs and cinematographer Alex Ashe take longing, lingering B-roll of the performers.

“Conclave” and “The Brutalist” are among the nominees for this year’s Set Decorators Society of America Awards.

“Anora,” “Emilia Perez” and “The Substance” are also among the films recognized by the Sdsa.

The awards celebrate excellence in the art of set decoration for film with the decor and design categories.

Now in its fifth year, the awards have become a precursor to the Academy Awards, with three out of its four winners going on to win the best Oscar for production design. Last year, “Poor Things” won an Sdsa award before winning the Oscar.

Winners will be announced on Feb. 2

Full list of nominations are below.

Best Achievement in Décor/Design of a Contemporary Feature Film

“Anora” — Neon

Set decoration by Christopher Phelps with production design by Stephen Phelps

“Civil War” — A24

Set decoration by Lizbeth Ayala with production design by Caty Maxey

“Conclave” — Focus Features

Set decoration by...

The Set Decorators Society of America has revealed the film nominations for its 2024 Sdsa Awards spanning decor/design categories for contemporary, period, fantasy/sci-fi and comedy/musical pics. See the full list below.

The nominees include such awards-season favorites as Wicked, Emilia Pérez, Dune: Part Two, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave and Anora along with box office hits Deadpool & Wolverine, Gladiator II and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Winners will be revealed on February 2 during the international group’s Sdsa Awards for Film 2024.

Last year’s Sdsa Awards went to the teams behind Poor Things, Saltburn, Barbie and Asteroid City. Poor Things production designers James Price and Shona Heath and set decorator Zsuzsa Mihalek went on to scoop the Production Design Oscar.

Here are the film nominees for the 2024 Sdsa Awards. Note that the group did not include a Best Picture category as it did last year:

Best Achievement In...

The Set Decorators Society of America announced its nominations for the 2024 Sdsa Awards for Film today, celebrating excellence in the art of set decoration for movies released in 2024.

Five films were nominated in each of the four categories: Contemporary, Period, Fantasy or Science Fiction, and Comedy or Musical. Final voting for the winners takes place from Jan. 11 to Jan. 17 and winners will be announced Feb. 2, 2025.

This is just the fifth year of the Sdsa Awards, but this important precursor has already become a formidable bellwether for the Academy Awards. In three of the past four ceremonies, the eventual Oscar winner for Best Production Design won this set decoration prize first. Mank won Best Period Feature here before prevailing at the Oscars in 2021. The next year, Dune to Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Film before winning over the Academy. Last year, Poor Things won Best Period Feature before its big Oscars win.

The first hour of “Anora” is designed to feel like a Cinderella story. Ani (Mikey Madison), a Brooklyn sex worker, gets swept up into the whirlwind lifestyle and absurd wealth of Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the 19-year-old son of a Russian oligarch who goes from her client to husband in the course of a week.

“I was trying to present the audience with a classic Hollywood romantic comedy, maybe a dirty romantic comedy, but a romantic comedy for the first 45 minutes to an hour,” said writer and director Sean Baker when he was guest on IndieWire’s Toolkit podcast. “I knew that could be its own movie. I always say, ‘You can get up and leave the theater when the helicopter shot that pulls out from the mansion and she’s living happily ever after, and that’s it.’ I even bookend it with this pop song.”

But for that Cinderella story to work,...

[Editor’s note: The following story contains major spoilers for “Anora.”]

“Anora” ends with a grand gesture, and a moment of gratitude that curdles into despair and possibly hope. And Sean Baker is here to talk how it was done.

The writer/director’s finale, set inside a car as snow falls on Brighton Beach outside it and windshield wipers lull the audience into a kind of trance until Baker and team drop the hammer, is one of the all-time great movie endings. It’s the sort of shattering cut-to-black that leaves you stuck to your seat, an emotional sendoff to what was heretofore a deceptively screwball comedy about a sex worker and exotic dancer, Ani (Mikey Madison), whose “greatest day” leads to a rock-bottom revelation.

Dispatched Russian henchman Igor has carted Ani from Vegas, where she had a whirlwind contract marriage to a party-hopping childish whisp of an oligarch’s son (Mark Eydelshteyn), back to New York. The marriage (“a fraud marriage?...