[IMG:L]The good news is that this year’s crop of nominees for Film Independent’s 2008 Spirit Awards featured a diverse array of international actors and filmmakers.
The bad news is that Lisa Kudrow and Zach Braff, who were tasked with making the formal announcements, had more than a little bit of trouble wrapping their lips around some of the more challenging names on the list at the 8 a.m. unveiling in Los Angeles’ Sofitel hotel.
“It was tough,” Kudrow admitted to Hollywood.com after the announcement, explaining that she had been prepared for some of the tongue-twisting nominee names and still had trouble with her pronunciations early in the morning. “They spelled it all phonetically [on the teleprompters] and so that’s embarrassing.”
To her credit, she nailed the name of Best Supporting Male nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor of Talk to Me.
[IMG:R]Braff fared slightly better (his secret: “I had a little bit of coffee”), making fun of the duo’s pronunciation problems by deliberately and delicately delivering the name of a Best Female Lead nominee that the crowd might be passingly familiar with: “An-gel-ina Jo-LIEEE, for A Mighty Heart.”
Dawn Hudson, the executive director of Film Independent (the organization that selects the nominees from the year’s slate of films budgeted under $20 million) told Hollywood.com the international flavor of the 2008 nominees marked a welcome globalization reflective of the industry.
“There are a lot of international films, and I think that’s a comment on the state of independent filmmaking, that films are made around the world,” she said, citing both the American films created in other countries and the foreign-made movies that fill the best foreign film category. “It’s become a trend, I think, in independent film.”
That trend made for some interesting categorizations, finding U.S. director Julian Schnabel’s French language film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly nominated in four of the main categories, actors Tang Wei and Tony Leung from the Chinese language film Lust, Caution scoring nods (but none for Taiwan-born director Ang Lee), actor Irrfan Khan getting a supporting actor nod for the Indian-themed film The Namesake, and the English language film Once, a Irish production, landing in the Best Foreign Film category.
Beyond the multicultural flavor of the 2008 Spirit nominees, Hudson thought the connective thread collecting this year’s film was diversity.”I think there’s political films and comedies and big films by veteran filmmakers. There are smaller films by absolute newcomers,” she said. “I think it’s an incredibly exciting year because of the array of talent.”
[IMG:L]The talent ranges from highly regarded indie favorites like directors Todd Haynes (I‘m Not There), Gus Van Sant (Paranoid Park) and Tamara Jenkins (The Savages) and actresses Parker Posey (Broken English) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Margot at the Wedding), to established Hollywood players such as Angelina Jolie, Don Cheadle (Talk to Me), Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Savages), Cate Blanchett (I’I‘m Not There) and Marisa Tomei (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), to emerging talents like actress Ellen Page (Juno) and screenwriter Zoe Cassavetes (Broken English).
The film also singled out the late writer-director-actress Adrienne Shelly for her screenplay for one of the year’s most popular indie comedies, Waitress; honored actress Julie Delpy and screenwriter Scott Frank for becoming hyphenates with their first directorial efforts (2 Days in Paris and The Lookout, respectively); and boosted the Oscar nomination nod odds for performers like Frank Langella (Starting Out in the Evening).
“I think that we typically have some overlap with the Oscars,” said Hudson, “but our nominations come out first in the year and it’s kind of before the hype of all the other awards and award campaigns … It’s sort of a pure ceremony.”
Kudrow, who was able to branch past her familiar Friends persona with roles in acclaimed indie films like The Opposite of Sex, finds a noble side to the Spirit Awards, beyond the self-congratulatory puffery of other ceremonies. “It’s putting the spotlight on independent film and that’s what’s helpful about nominations and the awards and stuff for independent film,” she said. “I think the more awards can show something the easier it is to talk someone into going to pay money to see it.”
[IMG:R]But she’s also a fan at heart and described her favorite part of the Spirit Awards as “just seeing who’s going to get it and being reminded of who’s nominated and seeing clips of the films and realizing, like, ‘Oh, I have to see that one –’ if I haven’t seen it yet. That’s what’s fun about any awards show. You see the actors that you like in a different context and the clips.’”
Braff, a former Spirit winner for Best First Feature for 2004’s Garden State, is well aware of how the spotlight of the indie awards helped him develop his career as a writer-director of small-budgeted yet worthy films past his well-established identity as a comedic actor on TV’s Scrubs.
“I think the whole point of this awards show more than any other is that it points the American public–and actually the whole world–in the direction of tiny films that need the attention,” he told Hollywood.com. “It brings the press. It brings the television coverage, the newspaper coverage and really exposes everyone to films that they never would’ve heard of. These aren’t films that have the budgets to advertise and be in the papers and be all over the place. So something like this really gets the word out.”
