A Break From the Usual Suspects
Indie kudos celebrate diverse voices and left-of-center cinematic visions
As the 2018 awards season marches slowly into its final days, only a handful of honors remain undistributed after some of the most volatile and contentious campaigns in years. Front-runners have come and gone in one major category after the next, as each guild and critics group announced different winners than its predecessors, demolishing expectations even among industry experts and turning a celebration of the cinematic arts into a no-holdsbarred brawl for top honors.
But even as other organizations wrestle with the names, numbers and broadcasting merits of different categories, Film Independent sails smoothly toward its Feb. 23 Spirit Awards ceremony with a clearer mandate than ever to reward the effort put into a filmmaker’s vision rather than whatever PR narrative is constructed around it.
“This year the nominations are all over the place across all of the different award shows, but for the Spirit Awards, I feel like it was an incredible year artistically,” says Josh Welsh, president of Film Independent. “When you just look at best feature for our show where you have ‘Eighth Grade,’ ‘First Reformed,’ ‘Leave No Trace,’ ‘Beale Street’ and ‘You Were Never Really Here,’ those are five very different, powerful films. There’s so much artistic variety in the nominations this year and I feel like it’s very strong, definitely independent line-up.”
Although nominees in several acting and technical categories overlap with the Oscars, the 2019 Spirit Awards marks the first time in a decade that not one contender for the top prize received a nomination for best picture. That, along with directing noms for not one but three female filmmakers, offers a sign to Welsh that the organization is fulfilling its core goals.
“We want to make sure that diverse voices are represented at the Spirit Awards, and that fits with Film Independent’s yearround initiatives,” he says. “Even for us, the numbers can be better, but compared to the other award shows, for best director we have Debra Granik, Tamara Jenkins and Lynne Ramsay nominated, and I am very proud of that. Those films absolutely deserved to be nominated in that category in my opinion, and they’re doing great work.”
Welsh suggests that their practice of announcing nominations in mid-november, well ahead of virtually every other organization’s superlatives, allows them to avoid Best Feature
“Eighth Grade” “First Reformed”
“If Beale Street Could Talk” “Leave No Trace” “You Were Never Really Here”
Best First Feature ”Hereditary” “Sorry to Bother You” “The Tale” “We the Animals” “Wildlife”
John Cassavetes Award “A Bread Factory” “En el Septimo Dia” “Never Goin’ Back” “Socrates” “Thunder Road” What: Film Independent’s Indie Spirit Awards
When: 2 p.m. Feb. 23 Where: A tent on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif. web: filmindependent.org/ spirit-awards/ much of the sniping that goes on between rival films. “Those narratives haven’t really been locked in yet,” Welsh says. “Our nominating committees are watching from the summer up into the late fall, but none of those narratives about who’s a front-runner and all that is in place. Nobody has a clue about it and nobody’s worried about it.”
He also indicates that the consistency of their criteria — even in the face of changing models of funding and distribution — has provided a steady foundation for finding films Film Inde- pendent considers worthy of recognition.
“Admittedly the word ‘independent’ is very slippery and can mean different things in different contexts,” Welsh says. “But we’re looking at films that have original, provocative subject matter, that have a distinct point of view, that are artistically audacious, and that were made with an economy of means. And I feel like it’s no different now with the big streamers; if your film is independent in how it was made and its artistic ambitions, we’ll consider it regardless of who’s distributing it.”
Film Independent’s 2019 honorary chair Lena Waithe, who created The Chi” for Showtime, co- created “Boomerang” for BET and produces a number of other projects, echoes Welsh’s sentiments about the organization’s inclusive and encouraging atmosphere.
“It celebrates those on the outside,” Waithe says. “Most indie movies are about people on the outskirts of society and this awards show celebrates them just as much as they celebrate the writers, direc-