The Other Award Show

Everyone has been chatting it up about the 80th Annual Academy awards including myself lately. A different and in some ways better award show was taking place last night. The Independent Spirit awards is a different take on the conventional award show. They exclude all the big studio released films and concentrate on the little ones. They even took out No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood so that the smaller films could stand a chance. It’s refreshing to see some different films get recognition for once.

Excluding a few films just wasn’t enough. Juno reigned supreme for once taking home three nods including Best Feature, Best First Screenplay, and Best Female Lead. Personally I think they should have booted Juno out of the running with No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. All three are technical indie releases of 2007 and all three have reached financial success. Juno has even grossed more money at the box office than both of the other two films combined. Granted they may have had a bigger studio budget than Juno did.

Take a look at the one of the categories from the last paragraph. See anything different? Where the Independent Spirit Awards really differentiates itself are the categories. They include things like Best First Screenplay, Best First Feature, and the John Cassavetes Award given to the best film with a budget under five-hundred thousand dollars. Sounds like a lot but to make a film it is pretty low. All of these categories allow first time filmmakers to have a fighting chance amongst the so-called “big dogs.” It also means that you get a chance to find films you’ve never even heard of before.

The show unfortunately falls into some of the same pitfalls as the regular award shows. There are countless moments of attempted humor by hosts and presenters that mainly fall flat. I guess that is why this year’s Golden Globes was better than normal. You got to skip all the bullshit and get right to the winners.

I’m holding higher hopes for the Academy Awards tonight since it is being hosted by Jon Stewart. Even if his jokes are stale they will still be funny because he has that Conan O’Brien thing going on. He can laugh at himself. Now if only there was an award show that contained fresh categories but didn’t exclude movies.