The 55th National Society of Film Critics Awards, given on 9 January 2021, honored the best in film for 2020.^[1][2]

Winners

Winners are listed in boldface along with the runner-up positions and counts from the final round:

Best Picture

1. Nomadland (52)
2. First Cow (50)
3. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (41)

Best Director

1. Chloé Zhao – Nomadland (58)
2. Steve McQueen – Small Axe (41)
3. Kelly Reichardt – First Cow (30)

Best Actor

1. Delroy Lindo – Da 5 Bloods (52)
2. Chadwick Boseman – Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (47)
3. Riz Ahmed – Sound of Metal (32)

Best Actress

1. Frances McDormand – Nomadland (46)
2. Viola Davis – Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (33)
3. Sidney Flanigan – Never Rarely Sometimes Always (29)

Best Supporting Actor

1. Paul Raci – Sound of Metal (53)
2. Glynn Turman – Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (36)
3. Chadwick Boseman – Da 5 Bloods (35)

Best Supporting Actress

1. Maria Bakalova – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (47)
2. Amanda Seyfried – Mank (40)
3. Youn Yuh-jung – Minari (33)

Best Screenplay

1. Eliza Hittman – Never Rarely Sometimes Always (38)
2. Jonathan Raymond and Kelly Reichardt – First Cow (35)
3. Charlie Kaufman – I'm Thinking of Ending Things (29)

Best Cinematography

1. Joshua James Richards – Nomadland (47)
2. Shabier Kirchner – Lovers Rock (41)
3. Leonardo Simões – Vitalina Varela (34)

Best Foreign Language Film

1. Collective – Alexander Nanau (38)
2. Beanpole – Kantemir Balagov / Bacurau – Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles (36)

Best Non-Fiction Film

1. Time – Garrett Bradley (46)
2. City Hall – Frederick Wiseman (28)
3. Collective – Alexander Nanau (22)

Film Heritage Award

• Film Comment, founded in 1962 and currently on hiatus, has long been the most substantial and wide-ranging American film magazine.
• Women Make Movies, which, since the 1970s, has been releasing daring and distinctive female-directed movies that more conventional distributors wouldn't touch.
• The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among America's premier repertory houses, showing arthouse movies steadily since 1953, and holding strong in continuing the time-honored tradition of daily double features.

Dedication

The meeting to decide the winners was dedicated to former Drama Desk president, and film and theater critic William Wolf, who died on March 28, 2020, due to COVID-19. Wolf was a longtime NSFC member whose career spanned Cue and New York magazines as well as his online Wolf Entertainment Guide.^[3]