Together didn't have the votes

I've just discovered exactly how far out on a limb I may be with my #1 movie of 2025.

The Australian Film Critics Association, of which I am a member, did not even consider it one of the six best Australian films of 2025.

You may recall that in this post, in which I took a deep dive into my first Australian #1, I said the following:

"Usually when I get the email that contains the nominees for this year's Australian Film Critics Association awards, which mostly focus on films with a strong Australian connection (they do have one "international" category so they can include something like One Battle After Another), it's a bunch of fringe nominees indeed. Yes an Elvis sometimes sneaks its way in there, but this list is usually comprised of films made by, but also only seen by, Australians. I've heard of these movies because I live in Australia, but most outside Australia won't know them from a hole in the ground.

That email has not yet come out this year, but it when it does, I suspect it will include my #1 movie of the year."

Yeah, no.

In fact, I tried to stack the deck in favor of this happening by finally voting on the nominees myself. I've never done it before, though the emails we get remind us of the fact that it is an obligation of membership to do so.

I ranked Together as high in every category -- you give preferential rankings to an existing list of eligible options -- as I possibly could, and yet it did not score a single nomination. Not in any category.

Instead, the six best picture nominees are:

Bring Her Back
The Correspondent
A Grand Mockery
Inside
Lesbian Space Princess
The Surfer

A grand mockery, indeed.

I've only seen half of those films, and I've only heard of five of the six. A Grand Mockery was completely unknown to me. 

Bring Her Back, which was in my top 20 overall (exactly #20), was my second nominee in all those categories, and I like Inside and The Surfer as well. But my third nominee, Spit, also got shut out, while my fourth nominee, Dangerous Animals, only got a lead acting nomination for Jai Courtney.

I guess the pickings weren't as slim as I blithely assumed them to be.

I have two theories on the zero love for my beloved:

1) It may have been a film made in Australia by an Australian crew and director, but in most respects it is not an "Australian film." In other words, while the location is never named, all the characters have American accents, so at best it's set somewhere in Canada. I can imagine, at this moment in our geopolitical history, that a bunch of Australian critics are not interested in rewarding an Australian film that is basically passing itself off as an American film.

2) There's a controversy regarding Together that I haven't touched on previously, because my love for the movie has prevented me from digging too deep into it. I've just read the Wikipedia summary to refresh my memory, and the creative team behind the 2023 film Better Half sued the creative team behind Together because the idea for Better Half was supposedly pitched to Dave Franco and Alison Brie in 2020, but they rejected the offer because they wanted to produce it themselves and bring in their own writer. Considering that movie was ultimately made with stars I've never heard of, I'm skeptical that it would have ever been the correct size of project for Brie and Franco, though now I feel like I should eventually see this film just to assess the similarities for myself. In any case, if the AFCA critics were already biased against Together for passing itself off as American, they certainly wouldn't have appreciated claims that it might have been plagiarized. 

Although I understand the logic behind both of those factors above, I'm still peeved enough that I might not actually vote to crown a winner.