Complete List of AARP’s Movies for Grownups Winners

The Host: Alan Cumming

The Movies for Grownups Awards host is a three-time Emmy nominee for TV’s The Good Wife, a star of James Bond and X-Men blockbusters and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and an Emmy-nominated host of the Tony Awards. But Cumming is also a famously entertaining song-and-dance man. He spoofs Cabaret in one of his Movies for Grownups Awards parody tunes, and he’s got the right — he won the Tony for best actor in Cabaret on Broadway.

Career Achievement: Lily Tomlin

She’s a star of hits ranging from Laugh-in, where she played a youngster named Edith Ann, to Robert Altman’s Nashville, for which she earned an Oscar nomination, to Grace and Frankie, which depicts issues of aging with respect, hilarity and precision. Using Edith Ann’s catchphrase, Tomlin told AARP, “I feel I am not only a grownup, but I am mature for my age — and that’s the truthhhhh!”

Best Picture/Best Movie for Grownups: Belfast

Inspired by writer/director/star Kenneth Branagh’s childhood in civil-war-torn 1969 Northern Ireland, Belfast is a coming-of-age story told through a child’s eyes. The movie makes you feel part of the tragically torn town and the unbreakable family, including the hero’s waggish grandparents (Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench), whose hearts still skip for each other.

Don’t miss this: Kenneth Branagh on the secrets of ‘Belfast’ — and aging

Best Actor: Will Smith (King Richard)

He’s been a rap, TV and movie star. But Smith has never crafted a more complex, nobly flawed and inspiring character than “King Richard” Williams, who coached his daughters Serena and Venus Williams to become, against all odds, champions.

Best Actress: Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos)

How authentic is she in the I Love Lucy backstage drama Being the Ricardos? Lucille Ball’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, said Kidman “became my mother’s soul.”

Best Supporting Actress: Aunjanue Ellis (King Richard)

Just as Richard got the lion’s share of credit for the Williams sisters’ success, the justly celebrated Will Smith has been the focus of much of King Richard's huge buzz. But Ellis’ subtler, quieter performance as the tennis stars’ wise mom — who stands up to Richard’s iron will and coaches them as well — is an equally profound achievement.

Don’t miss this: Aunjanue Ellis’s 7 tips on life and success after 50

Best Supporting Actor: Jared Leto (House of Gucci)

In a movie that’s like The Godfather with sequins, he plays a Fredo — the family’s treacherous black sheep. At the Movies for Grownups ceremony, Leto, who just turned 50 and is AARP eligible, said that what he learned from working with his fellow grownups Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Sir Ridley Scott in House of Gucci was this: “Creativity and imagination have no age. Dreams belong to everyone, not just the young.”

Best Director: Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog)

In one of the biggest Hollywood comeback stories ever, Campion returned to filmmaking after 13 years of being essentially shut out — despite her Oscar for The Piano — and at 67, she soars higher than ever with The Power of the Dog. Was there ever a more emotionally haunting Western?

Best Screenwriter: Tony Kushner (West Side Story)

The Angels in America playwright, who has written the screenplays for some of Spielberg’s finest films (Munich, Lincoln), helped make West Side Story more diverse, more historical and more timely for today. Plus he invented a role to bring back original West Side Story star Rita Moreno in a career-capstone performance.

Don’t miss this: Tony Kushner gives AARP the inside story on ‘West Side Story’

Best Intergenerational Film: CODA

In this poignant, feel-good film, a CODA, or child of deaf adults (Emilia Jones), helps her irascible folks (Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur) in the family fishing business and pursues her singing-career dream. When she sings “Both Sides Now,” her parents can’t hear it, but they can feel it, bridging the gaps of both generation and hearing.

Don’t miss this: Marlee Matlin’s 10 lessons for life

Best Ensemble: Nightmare Alley

Guillermo del Toro’s scary circus fable boasts the year’s most inspiring cast in roles vivid enough to trouble your dreams: Bradley Cooper’s con artist, David Strathairn’s magician who’s run out of tricks, Toni Collette’s mind reader, Willem Dafoe’s carnival barker and Cate Blanchett’s terrifying femme fatale psychiatrist.

Best Time Capsule: Spencer

Kristen Stewart plays Princess Diana in a film that’s neither a documentary nor a conventional biopic, but rather a dreamy, poetical, melancholy “fable from a true tragedy.” Its fantasy captures a vivid sense of Diana and her times, with a killer ’80s soundtrack and a stunning performance by Timothy Spall as her sinister royal supervisor.

Best Grownup Love Story: Cyrano

In a fresh reimagining of Edmond Rostand’s oft-adapted 1897 play, Game of Thrones standout Peter Dinklage plays the romantic poet whose physical disadvantages are redeemed by his silver tongue. It’s a great big whirligig of a musical that tells truths about grownup romance.

Best Documentary: Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

For the year’s top directing debut, Ahmir Khalib (Questlove) Thompson unearthed about 45 hours of performances by B.B. King, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Fifth Dimension and Stevie Wonder at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. It’s a sure cure for the summertime blues.

Don’t miss this: The rediscovered story of the ‘Black Woodstock’

Best Buddy Picture: Finch

Tom Hanks plays the last man on earth, an engineer who builds a robot (Caleb Landry Jones) to care for his beloved pooch, and sets out with them on a perilous trek through the American West. Who says a best buddy has to be human?

Best Foreign Film: Sheep Without a Shepherd (China)

Last Emperor star Joan Chen plays a very bad cop in an international smash hit that’s more than just another skillful crime drama. As Chen says, “The film is a taut mystery. But I believe the reason for its wide appeal is because it’s also a story about parental love and sacrifice, a theme that resonates with audiences across age groups and nationalities.”

Best Actress (TV): Jean Smart (Hacks)

At 70, Smart aces the role of a lifetime, as a sardonic Las Vegas stand-up comic in a funny, profound meditation on aging and intergenerational bonding. “The opportunities I’m being given the last 20 years have become more and more gratifying and challenging,” she told AARP. “It’s a sweet spot in my life.”

Don’t miss this: Jean Smart on peaking after 60

Best Actor (TV): Michael Keaton (Dopesick)

The master of ripped-from-the-headlines dramas plays a doctor caught up in the opioid epidemic. Brilliant entertainment, Dopesick also makes a statement. As Keaton said at the Movies for Grownups Awards, “Just because we’re all grownups doesn’t mean we kind of sit back and relax and retire. We have jobs to do, which is to move the ball forward on a lot of issues — and this is one of them.”

Best Limited Series/TV Movie: Mare of Easttown

The year’s greatest murder mystery is also an absorbing portrait of a small town full of unkeepable secrets, with indelible performances by Kate Winslet, Jean Smart and Julianne Nicholson.

Best TV Series: Ted Lasso

An infinitely cynicism-free comedy about an unstoppably optimistic U.S. football coach hired to coach an eccentric U.K. soccer team. Ted knows naught about soccer but all about pleasing people — and grownup audiences.

Don’t miss this: 10 things you need to know about ‘Ted Lasso’