Spirit Award Winners

Since they aren't airing the show live (it comes on at 10 PM EST) we shan't live-blog -- seriously in this day and age no live airing? Epic stupidity -- but we can share winners and talk about highlights after zee fact late tonight or tomorrow as we just skim through the show.

Jennifer Lawrence and Nicole Kidman, both nominated

Best First Screenplay Lena Durhman Tiny Furniture. Though she's already won the true prize: an HBO pilot deal. Tiny Furniture is quite singular and funny so check it out when you can.

Best Cinematography Matthew Libatique Black Swan. Yay! Single best thing about Black Swan if you ask me. He also won our gold medal.

Best Supporting Actress Dale Dicky in Winter's Bone. She puts the hurt on Lawrence so beautifully.

Best First Feature Aaron Schneider for Get Low. (Scott Cooper won this last year for Crazy Heart. Moral of the story: Find an old grizzly acting legend and you're newbie gold!)

Best Actor James Franco in 127 Hours. I'm so glad Colin Firth wasn't eligible. Firth was good in The King's Speech but so were a lot of people this year.

Best Documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. Mr Brainwash accepts the prize. Apparently goes on and on. Honestly I feel like I'm live blogging blindfolded. I hate tape delay. This is 2011. This is not my childhood with 3 television stations and friends who had something exotic called "cable"

Best Foreign Film The King's Speech.  I guess it's too much to ask the masses to vote for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. And the masses can vote on the Spirits if they join. Which is, I think, why it's more like the Oscars than not of late.

Robert Altman Award to Please Give. Yay. It also made our best ensemble nominations. Have you seen it yet?

poll by twiigs.com

Cassavettes Awards Daddy Longlegs

Best Supporting Actor John Hawkes for Winter's Bone. It's turning into quite a "Weekend in the Ozarks" here. Is it too much to hope that Jennifer Lawrence wins too? A nice change of pace that'd be. And when there are so many hundreds of awards to win each year, why do they all gotta go to the same things?

Mark Ruffalo tweeted a beautiful congrats to his "opponent" and apparently friend.

John Hawkes is the Man. Congratulations brother. All our days in shitty little theaters back in the day paid off. Blessings!!

And he also snapped a photo of Lisa Cholodenko and her woman Wendy. The Cholodenkos Are All Right. Speaking of...

Best Screenplay Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg for The Kids Are All Right

Best Actress Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Best Director Darren Aronofksy, Black Swan

Best Feature Black Swan

It started as a Winter's Bone evening and then sported a rash that quickly turned into black swan feathers.

And that's it. Now the show is but an afterthought. What strange programming decisions stations make of late. The things that IFC felt were more important to show during the actula awards were The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) and Boondock Saints (2000) which they have undoubtedly shown hundreds of times already.

Stranger still it seems my IFC is not working. Dang. I was really not meant to watch this. I shall dutifully wait to see YouTube videos of Dale Dickey and John Hawkes winning their well deserved prizes.

See also: THE NICOLE KIDMAN SPIRIT SHOW

My Own Private Franco

In his ongoing hipster efforts to become the gayest straight man of all time, or maybe just the most storied and/or most interesting celebrity of the new millenium, James Franco recently joined  forces with his Milk (2008) auteur Gus Van Sant for another look at the gay hustler drama My Own Private Idaho (1991) starring Keanu Reeves and the late great River Phoenix. They've collaborated on a two film exhibit for the Gagosian called "Unfinished". It opens this saturday so that Franco may completely own the weekend. He's hosting the Oscars on Sunday.

The films are called Endless Idaho, which is 12 hours long featuring unused footage from the film shoot as well as footage shot years before that Van Sant showed Franco during the Milk period, and My Own Private River, which is described like so.

My Own Private River consists largely of shots of Phoenix 's character, Mike, woven into a compelling portrait. Franco describes being mesmerized by Phoenix 's "uninhibited acting" in this unreleased footage, and his edit captures the gifted actor at his most emotionally expressive and physically dynamic. The score is by Michael Stipe, who is an art school drop-out.

If I were in Beverly Hills, I'd gladly take this in. River Phoenix's "Mike" is one of the best performances of the Nineties if you ask me, and he was criminally denied an Oscar nomination (the film was completely snubbed though River did win the Independent Spirit Award). I still vividly remember receiving the news of his death, a shock so sudden and dispiriting for the cinema that I have (gratefully) only ever experienced it's like one other time (Heath Ledger).