Spirit Award Winners

by Nathaniel R

Get Out won Feature and Director at the Spirit Awards (but no other prizes)

The headline prizes
BEST FEATURE "Get Out"
BEST FEMALE LEAD Frances McDormand “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”
BEST MALE LEAD Timothée Chalamet “Call Me by Your Name”
BEST SUPPORTING FEMALE Allison Janney “I, Tonya”
BEST SUPPORTING MALE Sam Rockwell “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”
BEST DIRECTOR Jordan Peele “Get Out”
BEST SCREENPLAY Greta Gerwig “Lady Bird”

It says a lot about the intrinsic problems of awards season and rampant conformity that even at the Spirits they aren't willing to budge from the Oscar frontrunners, except when they're forced to (Gary Oldman wasn't eligible here so we happily get one big Timothée win)...

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Spirit Award Nominations 2017

by Nathaniel R

The Film Independent Spirit Award nominees hit today. Tessa Thompson and Lily Collins were on hand to announce the awards with the longest stretch of time between nominations and awards. The ceremony, as ever, will be held the day before the Oscars. So that's Saturday, March 3rd 2018 this time.

It was a huge day for Sony Pictures Classics (the company received 13 nominations in total) and for A24, too. Almost every single movie A24 released this year was nominated for at least a little something. As far as underseen pictures the happiest nominee this morning has to be Sony Pictures Classics' The Rider (reviewed here) which was a busy film on the festival circuit but has yet to be released. 

The Nominees Are...

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A Clean Sweep for "Moonlight" at the Spirit Awards

Moonlight won in every category it was nominated in yesterday in Spirit Award's big tent. That was five prizes as well as a sixth (non-competitive) with their annual Robert Altman award honoring great ensembles. Smartly the prize goes not just to the cast but the director and the casting director. The A24 hit won't be quite that lucky tonight at the Oscars but hopefully it won't go home empty-handed either.

a moment between Mahershala Ali and The Bening at the Spirit Awards

History is full of wonderful films that had big nights at the Spirits as their last hurrah before Oscar shut-outs or Screenplay- only wins (The Wrestler, Far From Heaven, Sideways come to mind). But if you'd like to maintain hope that Moonlight takes Best Picture tonight at the Oscars there is always this factoid: The Spirit Awards Best Film winner has gone on to win the Oscar for Best Picture four out of six times this decade: The Artist (2011), 12 Years a Slave (2013), Birdman (2014), and Spotlight (2015)

The winners list as well as videos of some moments under that famous tent after the jump.

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A New Awards Group? Yup, Another One for the Indies

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...  

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Laura Dern Week: "Smooth Talk" and "Mask"

Surprise -- It's Laura Dern Week!

With HBO's event miniseries Big Little Lies arriving in less than two weeks (February 19th - wooo) and with Laura Dern's 50th birthday happening even sooner (this Friday!) Team Experience will be celebrating the freakishly expressive Laura Dern, aka "The Face," every afternoon this week.

Though some of her earliest revelatory performances are not as readily available as they should be (none are streaming) let's talk about a few of them with an emphasis on Mask (1985) after the jump...

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