Nominations open for the 2023 Cosmos!

Nominations are now open for the 2023 Cosmique Movie Awards. Nomination ballots may be submitted up until midnight on Saturday, April 20, 2024.

Ballots are multiple choice, with the option to write in one or more nominees if your favorites don’t appear on the ballot. The pre-population “buzzworthy” ideas come from a variety of sources. For some major awards, we included those who were nominated at any of the other major awards like the Oscars, Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, BAFTAs, and other awards. We also included others that were on Gold Derby editors’ lists of predictions. For some awards, especially genre awards, we included the top-ranked IMDb and Rotten Tomato lists corresponding to those awards. We also used results from appropriate “listicle” articles (articles like “Best cameos of 2023!”). And we liberally sprinkled in our own favorites among the “buzzworthy” suggestions.

For each award, voters can nominate up to six different films or performances. Duplicate entries for the same award will only be counted once. Do as much or as little as you want. If there are only two films you want to vote for in a particular category, just nominate those two. If there are entire awards where you can’t think of any nominations, skip it.

Voters should not feel constrained to these suggestions. Feel free to include one or more write-in suggestions from any eligible 2023 film. If a film was released at film festivals in 2022, and maybe a few screens, but wasn’t generally available to Cosmo voters until 2023, we can consider it to be a 2023 film.

In addition, voters have the option of casting a Power Vote for each award. The Power Vote is for one of their six nominees (not a seventh) to give it a little extra weight. The Power Vote is entirely optional.

If you cast your ballots and want to make any changes, please email us with the request. If you don’t know our email, we aren’t going to post it here for spammers. Instead, post a comment on this article and we will get back to you.

A note about gender

In the past, some of our awards have been “ungendered” (such as “Favorite Villain” rather than separate male and female villain categories). We moved to separately gendered categories for all performance awards because we felt that the awards tended to skew towards male performers.

As more and more trans, drag, and nonbinary performers are given opportunities on the big screen, this has led to some confusion. We’ve always been fairly flexible about how voters would like to interpret each award’s scope, but there is one over-arching rule:

Above all else, be kind.

If someone is doing a role in drag, we allow great flexibility. Charles Busch, for example, received a Best Actress nomination for Die, Mommie, Die! in a role where he in drag played a cisgendered woman. Similarly, the drag queen Divine received nomination votes in both male and female Lifetime Achievement categories, though he was only nominated in female categories.

But if a performer is trans, it would be rude and disrespectful to nominate them in a category other than the gender for which they have publicly identified.

This can be tricky for nonbinary performers. Those performers are eligible for nomination in either female or male categories unless they have expressly stated a preference for one or the other.

As an example: three RuPaul’s Drag Race alums had cameos as drag queens in Hocus Pocus 2. Kornbread Jeté is a trans woman, and it would be disrespectful to nominate her for the Best Male Cameo award instead of the Best Female Cameo. Kahmora Hall has identified as a cis male, and would be best nominated in the male category, though either could be appropriate since she appeared in drag. Ginger Minj identifies as nonbinary and could be nominated for either gendered award.

Above all else, be kind.

Nomination Ballots

Vote in these groups of awards by midnight on Saturday, April 20, 2024:

• Lifetime Achievement Halls of Fame nomination ballots
• Best Overall of 2023 nomination ballots
• Best Performances of 2023 nomination ballots
• Best by Genre of 2023 nomination ballots
• Specialty Awards of 2023 nomination ballots

Remember, ballots are due by Saturday, April 20, 2024.