And the winners were… 12 Years A Slave, Matthew McConaughey, Cate Blanchett, Jared Leto, Lupita Nyong’o…
Hey, wait a minute. Aren’t the Oscars tomorrow night?
There was a time when the Independent Spirit Awards were genuinely, you know… independent. Films like Leaving Las Vegas, The Apostle, Gods and Monsters, Election and Memento won Best Film. Performers like Derek Luke, Tom Wilkinson, Shareeka Epps and Catalina Sandino Moreno were honored. But over the past decade or so, as the Oscars have gravitated toward lower-budgeted winners and the Spirit Awards have become more star-conscious, all that really stand between one set of awards and the other are more casual outfits and a maximum budget limit. (This year, Gravity and American Hustle went over that limit, so 12 Years director Steve McQueen took Alfonso Cuaron’s likely Sunday prize.) The complete list of winners is here.
The Spirits were once also known for being a freewheeling, frequently drunken party, taking place in the afternoon in a tent on the Santa Monica beach and aired live on cable TV back when that was a frontier. Now they’re pretaped and edited, and this year’s proceedings were livened up only by a few f-words, an epic acceptance saga from McConaughey (Leto was apparently even more longwinded–host Patton Oswalt even joked about it later in the broadcast–but his speech was edited down before air) and when Blanchett pointedly wondered why there were more Best Actor nominees than there were for Best Actress.
Think of the Spirits as now the final dress rehearsal before the Big Event. Which is now less than 24 hours away…
Related Posts
-
OSCARLAND: Producers Guild Nominations
The calendar has turned to 2014, and the critics, for the most part, have spoken. Now Oscar season is moving into the Guild part of its schedule, and today the Producers Guild announced its Best Picture nominees. The PGAs have been a fairly accurate precursor of Oscar nominees, with…
-
OSCARLAND: The BAFTAs
Although there were some new faces due to release patterns and category differences, in the big picture, the BAFTAs–Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars–turned out to be very much like the Golden Globes. The full list of winners is here, but the headline is that 12 YEARS A SLAVE managed…
-
OSCARLAND: The SAG Nominations
The Screen Actors Guild Awards are important, because the Actors branch is the largest single constituency of Oscar voters, but they’re also very different from the Oscars. Their major award isn’t a “Best Picture” prize, per se, but one for Best Cast–this hurts intimate dramas like Gravity and All…
-
OSCARLAND: AFI Top 10s
The American Film Institute issued its list of the year’s Top 10 movies (and television shows) today, and their selections have been quite close to the Oscar nominees over the past couple of years, so they’re worthy of some attention. There were no great surprises in the chosen 10,…
-
THE BIJOU AWARDS BAIT REPORT: Ugh-scar
>It may not literally be true that if you look up “hack” in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of Brett Ratner. In fact, not all his movies are terrible: there’s Family Man, and… well, Family Man really wasn’t bad at all. But did we need the director of Money…
About the Author
Mitch Salem
MITCH SALEM has worked on the business side of the entertainment industry for 20 years, as a senior business affairs executive and attorney for such companies as NBC, ABC, USA, Syfy, Bravo, and BermanBraun Productions, and before that, at the NY law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. During all that, he has more or less constantly been going to the movies and watching TV, and writing about both since the 1980s. His film reviews also currently appear on screened.com and the-burg.com. In addition, he is co-writer of an episode of the television series "Felicity."
More articles by
Mitch Salem »
