Little Miss Sunshine Big Winner at the Indie Spirits

It was a good day for Little Miss Sunshine and Half Nelson at Saturday's Independent Spirit Awards. Little Miss Sunshine won four and Half Nelson won two awards. Here are ten things I learned at the big tent by the Santa Monica beach today:

1. Academy Awards producer Laura Ziskin will allow all five producers to come onstage to accept the Oscar, Fox Searchlight confirmed today. When Little Miss Sunshine won the best feature award Saturday afternoon, the three producers who had been given the green light by the Academy graciously allowed the two who weren't, Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, to say their thanks first. Michael Arndt also won for best first screenplay, Alan Arkin won for best supporting actor and Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton won for directing. "We were dead in the studio system," said Dayton. "Thankfully people in the independent world stuck with us. We're grateful to our five producers—"All five," chimed in Faris—for sticking with us."

2. Several people said they were relieved to hear that Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin wasn't in the tent, because host Sarah Silverman, wearing a short school girl outfit, was fairly X-rated—she started out comparing the Indie Spirits to the Adult Film Awards and performed one skit about fucking her favorite bag of cheese. At the IFC Party afterwards at Shutters on the Beach, John Waters praised her: "She did a good job." As far as I was concerned he got the biggest laugh of the night when he came out wearing a chain like Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan and said, "never waste a good prop. I wouldn't mind if Samuel L. Jackson chained me to a radiator." (He presented best screenplay to Jason Reitman for Thank You For Smoking.)

3. I'm going to lose my office Oscar pool. The consensus seemed to be that The Lives of Others would beat Pan's Labyrinth for Best Foreign Film. Everyone agrees that Pan should win art direction and makeup. On the Oscar ballot, the Best Score category doesn't show the name of the composer. Babel could win, but if people remember that Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla won last year for Brokeback Mountain, it could also go to Alexandre Desplat for The Queen. I went to a lunch on Friday at the French consulate for Desplat, an articulate man who also composed the excellent score for The Painted Veil. He's moving on to score a studio fantasy, The Golden Compass.

4. Even Dreamgirls writer-director Bill Condon, who's working on staging the three songs for Dreamgirls at the Oscars, is worried that they may have cancelled each other out. If everyone knew that the Beyonce Knowles song was Listen, they might vote for it, but it's not clear on the Oscar ballot. Which means that all these people who've been telling me they voted for Melissa Etheridge for An Inconvenient Truth may have voted for the winner.

5. Michelle Williams has spunk! Nominated for a Best Actress Indie Spirit Award for the micro-budget Land of Plenty, Williams admitted that many people criticized her for flipping the bird from their vacation hotel balcony at the paparazzi who were harassing her and Heath Ledger. She said that she and Ledger tend to walk around with sulky scowls when the photogs lurk so that the pictures won't get published. "They're looking for photos that make us look like we're living the happy life," she said.

Also with her share of spunk is Williams' fellow nominee, Amber Tamblyn (Stephanie Daley), who is clearly someone who stands up for herself. The two young women lost to veteran Frances McDormand for Friends with Money.

6. The LAT Calendar section is in a big fight with the Metro section, which ran a tough investigative piece Saturday by Paul Pringle, who does not cover the film beat, about Film Independent, which puts on the big Indie Spirits party every year. According to LAT critic Kenneth Turan, the story, which suggested that the organization doesn't plow back enough of its revenues into programs and services, was not shown to the Calendar editors, who are furious. The story revealed that Film Independent president Dawn Hudson earns $265,000 a year, more than her counterparts at the American Film Institute and The American Cinematheque, which did set some tongues wagging inside the Spirits tent. However Hudson is a popular figure in the indie film community who has worked long and hard to support indie film. Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard said that he thought someone with a right-wing agenda was going after indie cinema with this piece. The news story manipulated statistics and a nonprofit effectiveness measuring stick to strange effect.

For one thing, the carpet being walked today by doc filmmakers such as A.J. Schnack and stars Sally Kellerman and Nev Campbell, who were participating in a Robert Altman tribute, was blue, not red. The 600 plus outlets covering the event ranged from the KABC, Reelz, Canal Plus and the IFC Channel to the New York Daily News, Elle.com, The TV Guide Channel and BBC News. Was it a bad thing that indie films were being promoted around the world?

The people attending this event included "the best of the best of indie filmmakers in Hollywood," said Silverman. "If a bomb went off," she added, "there'd be nobody left to make a doc about it." Many of the filmmakers during the awards show went out of their way to thank Film Independent for supporting indie film. "Many of us feel this Spirit Award is the highest honor in America today and never more than today," said Little Miss Sunshine producer Ron Yerxa.

7. Jack Lechner, the lyricist for the song spoofs that were the highlight of the event, is slowly getting close to mounting a musical in New York. Minnie Driver performed a country take-off on Pan's Labyrinth. Loretta Devine really scored with "Beauty Is Deceased," about The Dead Girl. Taylor Dane kicked up her heels country style with "Screwed Up Family," about Little Miss Sunshine, to the tune of "We Are Family." Rosario Dawson delivered "The Crack-Head Teacher Man," off Half Nelson.

8. David Lynch is just as strange as we think he is. To promote his digital micro-budget movie Inland Empire, Laura Dern reminded as she accepted Lynch's Special Distinction Award from Dennis Hopper, Lynch set himself up on Hollywood Boulevard with a megaphone and a cow on a leash. Hopper described working on a Lynch movie as "surreal." After a good take on Blue Velvet, Lynch would say: "Solid gold! Peachy keen! Let's do one more!"

9. Robert Altman liked to torture his actors, but they loved him anyway. When he didn't like a take, Robert Downey, Jr. recalled, he said, "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly." And when he was pleased, he said, "That was absolutely adequate, let's move on." Film Independent established a new ensemble acting award named after Altman.

10. As usual, German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck cut to the chase when he advised up-and-coming filmmakers, while accepting his award for best foreign film for The Lives of Others, "Follow your own voice. Don't make a film by committee. There's a simple way to get that done: downscale the budget. When you work on a small budget the people you are working with are not in it for the money. They're fine with being exploited as long as you're exploiting yourself."

Guillermo Navarro, accepting the best cinematography prize for Pan's Labyrinth, praised director Guillermo del Toro for "being incredibly stubborn," he said. "This movie was in the hands of the filmmakers, and that's what made all the difference."

Comments

[jordon]

thanks for the rejoiner to that LAT calendar section article about the financial status of film independent. i'm not sold on either argument, but it's good to have someone visibly stick up for them.

i was not aware of the organization's nonprofit status, which makes me wonder why an organization unencumbered by corporate meddling would play it so safe in its awards this year. LMS cleaned up; isn't this movie generally considered like adult contemporary for the indie crowd? it would have been nice if more major awards had been given out for movies little seen by the public, instead of "royal tennenbaums" retreads like LMS.

oh well. the fact that david lynch and laura dern got a lifetime achievement award still makes the spirit awards lots more interesting to watch than the oscars. think we'll even hear the words "inland empire" uttered tonight, let alone have an honor bestowed on its director because of it?