A New Awards Group? Yup, Another One for the Indies
Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 5:40PM
NATHANIEL R in AIFA, Gotham Awards, Henry Gamble's Birthday Party, Kate Plays Christine, Krisha, Spirit Awards, The Fits, The Invitation

Over the years I realize that The Film Experience has been a bit of a killjoy in terms of one very specific development that other awards sites fawn on: the explosion of film award groups. It's just that over the years its been ridiculous to see the numbers explode but not see any correlative expansion of ideas or discussion about what constitutes great cinema. If all awards groups do is rubber stamp each other and watch the same 20 movies, we should just stick to the 3 or 4 original groups and be done with it! 

This preamble is a way of saying that when I heard there was a new Independent Film Award organization I initially rolled my eyes and shrugged it off with a tweet. Weren't The Gothams and the Spirits enough? But I've had a bit of a change of heart and am keeping an open mind after further investigation. If you're going to create a new film award, you need a purpose. And the American Independent Film Awards seems to have one. In fact, it looks like they're planning to do exactly what the Independent Spirit awards originally set out to do but have long since wandered away from as they've become a mainstream big publicity party for the mini-majors and their Oscar campaigns. The AIFA will focus on movies with budgets of $1 million or less. In other words, true indies as studios don't make films that size...  

This, we tip our hats in respect, is worth doing since there are no such honors at the moment. The closest you'll come to it is a single prize, the  "John Cassavettes Awards" at the Spirit Awards meant to honor films with teeny tiny budgets. But that single prize now feels like an afterthought for the Spirits who have essentially been coopted as part of the mainstream and seem to be happy playing there.

So here are the nominations and wins for the AIFAs where The Fits, a film we really loved last year, led the nominations though Krisha (which I was not a fan of, but which many other members of The Film Experiencewere) took home the most prizes with four wins. But again, to play killjoy, we wish the online references to these awards hadn't used the term "swept"... people don't seem to know what that means. Krisha did not win in all its categories. It just happened to win the most awards. This is not the same thing as a sweep.

BEST FILM 

 

If there's a link above it's to what we've written about the film. It's nice to see Henry Gamble's Birthday Party honored somewhere!

BEST DIRECTOR 

 

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

 

BEST IMPROVISATIONAL SCREENPLAY

 

BEST LEAD PERFORMANCE 

 

BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE 

 

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHER 

 

BEST EDITOR 

 

BEST COSTUME DESIGN 

 

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN **

 

BEST HAIR & MAKE-UP 

 

BEST SCORE

 

THE NOBUDGE FILM AWARD

 

 

THE MICHAEL CIMINO BEST FILM AWARD (Films with a budget between 1M to 3M)

 

 

TAKEAWAY / FREE ADVICE

They didn't ask us but we love to dispense free advice. The first pleas to the AIFA is to not dilute their message with weird wishy-washiness which you can see quite a bit of in the first year. Why, for instance do they have a single prize for films up to $3 million budgets when their purpose is to honor the scrappy shoe string movies made for under a million? Why are their varying numbers of nominees per category? They have categories with just a winner announced, categories with only a winner and a runner up. And then categories with the following number of nominees: 3, 5, 6, 7, 10. Some of this is due to ties (there should be tie-breaking rules) and some of this is due to inconsistency in their designated size of the category. But whatever the reason, it looks sloppy.

You can argue, historically, that the shows with a regular number of nominees per category tend to enjoy greater prestige (consider The Golden Satellites and the Critics Choice Movie Awards which seem to change their numbers and their categories at the drop of a hat -- and both have had trouble gaining respect). The Globes are more consistent but sometimes they have strange "whatever!" years where they slip which reinvites everyone to judge their respectability (remember that odd year with 7 nominees?). Set rules, standards, and parameters make organizations look more professional and serious about their directives. 

It would also help if the awards body were more transparent. I can't find an official website and their voting body is "film festival programmers and film critics" which --- is it a group of like-minded friends inviting each other to play an awards game?  Are there bylaws? More info would be great but most articles about them are just sharing their awards list. 

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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