Monday, February 25, 2008

The weekend was a 1-2 Film awards knockout, with the Indie Spirit Awards running on Saturday, followed by the the Academy Awards on Sunday. Crossover nominations for both were high this year, which must have resulted in a ton of tuckered out stars and starlets by the time Sunday night rolled around.

Having the two events back-to-back highlights how great the indies have fared this Oscar season. The Coen brothers No Country For Old Men proved the night’s big Oscar winner, with Best Picture and Director nods, while the crowd-pleaser Juno cleaned up at the Indie Spirit taking Best Picture, Best Actress (for Ellen Page) and Best Screenplay for Diablo Cody. Cody was a double winner: she grabbed the Oscar screenplay, too.

In some ways the two awards seem almost a reversal: the feel-good blockbuster taking over the Indie Spirit and the more edgy, but critically acclaimed, No Country For Old Men cleaning up at Oscar. Indeed, this might have been the year when the Indies most openly embraced big box-office returns and the Oscars pretty much followed the critics point for point, even giving the Best Actress nod to Marion Cotillard for La Vie En Rose.

The sea change can be attributed to a number of factors.  A big one: the huge-grossing comedies of Judd Apatow are fun but nobody is ready to give them an Oscar nod. More crucially, the sort of Important ‘A’ pictures that usually dominate Oscar season (such as Meryl Streep’s Lions For Lambs and Rendition) have had such a tepid audience and critical response that a nomination would be simply silly. Indeed, Hollywood has failed abysmally throughout 2007 to put out a thinking-pic that also attracts an audience.

If these trends keeps up, in a few years the Indie Spirit and Academy Awards may want to combine events with one big weekend extravaganza, hosted by, of course, Jon Stewart and Rainn Wilson.