This year’s Spirit Awards marked the first time in over a decade-and-a-half that my vote didn’t count. Considering how my “Will win” vs. “Should win” predictions panned out – I only missed the screenplay award; more on that later – it seems that my votes likely wouldn’t have made a huge difference in the massive, albeit completely anticipated, sweep of the evening’s prizes by Precious. I had been an IFP member for all that time, and for those who don’t know, even after Film Independent took its larger budgets and events and split from the rest of the IFP community, they still allow their former sister chapters to vote.
I wondered if Steve Pond’s “expose” on Spirit Award voting from a couple weeks ago was actually news to anyone who even pays attention to the Spirits. Granted, maybe there is an IFC audience out there not intimately involved with the film industry, but is that same audience reading The Wrap? Regardless, the main point of Pond’s article was that lots (most?) voters don’t have the opportunity to see most movies. That was certainly a much bigger problem 10-15 years ago before everyone had a computer, Netflix or a DVD player, and frankly, I think it’s more due to the fact that people don’t take the voting seriously. I mean, especially if you’re a member of an audience that eschews awards shows – at least the Oscars – how much of an effort are you really going to make.
I used to go to the IFP awards screenings all the time in the late ’90s at the Pioneer. I considered those screenings alone worthy of paying for my annual $100 membership. And unless the film was a “major” indie, the audiences were often pathetic, not coming close to filling the 99-seat house. Yet, schedule never managed to stop the popular titles from overflowing. People made time for those films.
Ridiculously or not, I always took my voting seriously, and even though I didn’t vote this year, I still take it seriously; that if I’m planning on expressing my opinion on an indieWIRE ballot or here in my little corner of the Web, I’m going to do my best to have seen as many of the films (ideally, all!) as possible.
And yet, even as I did that again, the most troubling thing to me about the Spirits, especially as they celebrate their 25th anniversary, is the ceremony, not the awards. The awards have always been a little off. They too often have rewarded the presumed Oscar also-rans; those films that received Oscar attention, but general consensus expects the nominations to be the awards. In fact, while I haven’t actually gone through the history of the Spirits to verify this, I believe this year could wind-up having the most cross-over in quite a while considering that both Jeff Bridges and Mo’Nique seem like virtual locks to take home the gold bald dude as well.
(For the record, I’m not sure why indieWIRE made a mistake with my ballot, but I also picked Mo’Nique as will and should win at the Academy Awards, yet their published version of my ballot shows me picking Maggie Gyllenhaal. I am a huge fan of Gyllenhaal’s, but I’m actually not a particular fan of Crazy Heart, and I thought she was somewhat wasted in the movie. I do not believe she deserves the Oscar for this role, and as much as I’m also not a fan of Precious, I whole-heartedly believe Mo’Nique’s extraordinary performance deserves all the attention it has deserved.)
Everyone seemed to lament the Spirits’ move from the beach in Santa Monica to downtown L.A. Well, I mourn further back than that. I miss the original Spirits; or at the very least, my first exposure to them in 1992. I miss the Spirits Laura Dern discussed last night. I covered the Independent Spirit Awards for the UCLA Daily Bruin that year. (Technically, that first word — Independent has been dropped you know; because it’s redundant with FIND’s name? And yet, isn’t that part of the problem?) It was a really informal blast. The ceremony was some a mixture of luncheon, ceremony and professional conference.
If you look on IMDb’s page for the Spirits, you’ll see that before 1995, they list “location unknown.” Same with the host before Jennifer Tilly in 2000. Well, I don’t remember all of them, but I do know that when I attended in 1991, it had moved for the first time to Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, across Melrose Avenue from Paramount and one of the oldest Studio lots in Hollywood. One of the first independent filmmakers, Charlie Chaplin, made many a film there, and for several years, its parking lot — covered with a tent familiar to wedding attendees – was home to the Independent Spirit Awards.
The host that year was Buck Henry! I clearly remember the Best First Feature award going to Matty Rich. It’s fascinating to look back on the nominees that year now. Rich’s film Straight Out of Brooklyn beat out the debut features of now notable filmmakers Michael Tolkin (The Rapture), Todd Haynes (Poison), and Richard Linklater (Slacker). (The fifth nominee was Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s film Chamelon Street.)
The Best Feature that year was Rambling Rose, for which Martha Coolidge also won Best Director. Her film beat John Sayles’ City of Hope, Joseph B. Vazquez’s Hangin’ With the Homeboys, David Mamet’s Homicide and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho.
I don’t mean to moan about the modern state of filmmaking compared to the early days of indie film. In fact, there are lots of wonderful films – big, small, truly indie and fake indie – that come out these days, including last year, but … come-the-fuck-on. Not one of this year’s Best Feature can hold a candle to any of those titles that came out in 1991. Sin Nombre and Amreeka would have been decent First Feature nominees, but I wouldn’t give the prize to either of them over Haynes, Tolkin or Linkalter’s films. The Messenger deserved Best Feature over the sloppily-scripted (which is obviously why it won that prize, I suppose) (500) Days of Summer or the eventual winner, Precious. I don’t necessarily believe all five Best Feature nominees need to exactly match the Best Director nominees, but this year, two of the latter nominees made films that were better than all five of the Feature nominees: Two Lovers and especially A Serious Man.
The problem as I see it with the Spirit Awards is now two-fold, and the ease or difficulty with which the 4,000-odd FIND and IFP members can see all the nominated films – an issue which seems like it would be somewhat simple to solve with Netflix’s streaming technology – is not even part of that equation.
First, Film Independent’s Spirit Awards are no longer independent, even though they represent the modern state of “independent film” or what “independent film” has become better than they know. The tent and round-table setting not-withstanding, each year, the ceremony looks more and more like a professional TV production. Of course, that’s because it is, with more and more poorly-scripted, unfunny banter that obviously makes the presenters as uncomfortable as the audience. In that tent at Raleigh Studios, there was a small stage made of risers, and an important part of the ceremony was the keynote address, given by some notable indie filmmaker. That year, it was Francis Ford Coppola. I also had the pleasure of seeing Jodie Foster and Martin Scorsese speak because they were that year’s “Honorary Co-chairs.” The keynote address disappeared a decade ago.
As independent film went mainstream, the Spirits added what would become the John Cassavetes Award. There was not as much need to specify “films made for under $500,000” in the early ’90s because anyone who wasn’t working on a studio wasn’t spending all that much more. (Rich’s film was notorious for costing $27,000, which had been put on his mom’s credit cards. He was only 17, remember?)
So it seems odd to me that in an age in which everyone is debating future forms and modes of indie film that the awards meant to celebrate the form continue to get larger and flashier and more produced. This journey for IFP/West-turned-FIND seemed to progress in perfect tandem with the development of all the studio art-house divisions, so as indie film became more polished, so did the Spirit Awards.
But that’s not the “independent spirit” to which they espouse, is it? I know … I sound like a crotchety nostalgic crank who abhors progress. And don’t get me wrong: I think a lot of great films receive attention from the Spirits they otherwise might not, and all the films honored last night at least dealt with struggles that a studio film would not have encountered. And I’m all for the indie film that breaks out and has popular success, especially if it’s any good. I guess I just wish that for all their hemming-and-hawing that the Spirits took away some of the polish; maybe they should try to recreate the award show in an indie film sensibility: that doesn’t mean just the ability to swear on IFC and a set-up that looks like a scaled down and less-expensive Golden Globes. I’m not completely sure what it does mean at this moment.
I just know that when the ceremony talks about celebrating 25 years of the Spirit Awards and then shows clips of winning “favorite moments” voted on by the online community, and the oldest of those clips comes from six years ago, somehow to me, that signifies the true indie spirit of these awards has gone somewhere else. The 1997 ceremony was my first since moving to New York. I’m not sure whether the then Independent Film Channel actually broadcast the ceremony or not, but if they did, Time Warner Cable did not yet carry the channel. I joined a couple hundred other NYC industry-types and indie film enthusiasts to watch a closed-circuit satellite feed at the Knitting Factory. Mike Leigh gave the keynote. Samuel L. Jackson was the host. There was nothing Oscar or Golden Globe about the show. People riffed on their own. Awards were handed out one after another. The show was no frills; just like the films. I miss that.
Oh yeah, the second issue? The nominees. They’re always totally whacky. Everyone is always confused as to where that dividing line of eligibility lives. It is fascinating to wonder why nobody was up-in-arms about The Hurt Locker not getting more nominations last year when it was eligible and yet this year it’s the greatest film ever made. Hadn’t everyone seen it in Toronto? Certainly the nominating committees, which are used I suppose because otherwise the membership really won’t have seen enough of the eligible films, had seen it since they doled out some acting nominations. And yet, they didn’t think the film deserved a Best Feature nomination over The Wrestler, Ballast, Frozen River, Rachel Getting Married nor Wendy and Lucy, and Bigelow didn’t get a Best Director nomination that Tom McCarthy, Lance Hammer, Rahmin Bahrani, Courtney Hunt or Jonathan Demme did. And yet, had The Hurt Locker been eligible this year, it would have likely swept more awards than Precious.
The nominating process is broken – whether or not it ever actually worked. This year’s nominations were probably the worst of them all, which may be why they confused so many people when they were announced.
And so, as the Spirits look towards their next 25 years, I would wish two things for them: First, that they explore a better, more systematic eligibility and nomination process that especially takes into account the current states of festivals and distribution. Maybe, for instance, the year of a film’s festival premiere should not bet he year of eligibility. Maybe there should be at least a 12 month waiting period from a first festival premiere to determine what kind, if any, of distribution that film will have so a film like The Hurt Locker, which had its premiere late in 2008 and took a little time to get bought and released, can match-up with its buzz (worthy or not) a bit. And second, take some of the veneer off the ceremony. Make it an awards show about film for film lovers. Make it entertaining and interesting.
Indie film is changing and exploring how it must recreate itself from the ground up. Frankly, the Spirit Awards need to do the same. The Miramax that helped create the golden age of indie film is gone. It might come back, in a similar but still different form, no? Maybe the Spirits can do the same, because otherwise, at least to me, they’re just now a ghost of what they actually once were and stood for.
Out of Focus 