Venues
Events
MediaFeature
Award Season Gets an Edgy Start
With indies making mainstream waves in 2008, the Independent Spirit Awards set the tone for 2009
Mickey Rourke in this year’s indie-film scene favorite, The Wrestler
| | More
In a year of Iron Men, Wall E’s, and Kung Fu Pandas, the independent film world instead offered up poignant personal narratives: border smuggling, a washed-up professional wrestler, and the indie-film scene’s favorite, a drug-addict daughter. All of them received nominations at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards.
The best director category at this year’s Spirit Awards includes Rachel Getting Married by director Jonathan Demme, a longtime industry heavy weight. Also Thomas McCarthy for The Visitor, a humanistic story dealing with subjects of immigration and friendship; Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop, focusing on an orphan in Queens; and Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, a story of illegal border crossing, about which Quentin Tarantino commented “[It] took my breath away…it put my heart in a vice and proceeded to twist that vice until the last frame.”
The best feature category gives nods to some of the same movies (Frozen River, Rachel Getting Married), plus two very different films this writer thinks will be going neck to neck for best feature: Wendy and Lucy, where Michele Williams was critically applauded for her understated performance, as well as Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. After a few edgier films (Pi, Requiem for a Dream), Aronofsky has been going back and forth from left of center to more mainstream fare for a few years. With The Wrestler, he explores lost fame and love. Aronofsky has also been cited as bringing back the career of Mickey Rourke, who plays the lead character.
Rourke, in the title role of The Wrestler, may have some competition from Sean Penn in Milk, as these are two of the most applauded male performances of the year. In the best female lead category, it’s another close call between Williams for Wendy and Lucy and Anne Hathaway’s performance as an addict who comes home for her sister’s wedding in Rachel Getting Married.
The best screenplay category may very well go to Charlie Kaufman for Synecdoche, New York. Kaufman, a longtime screenwriter, made his directorial debut with this effort, and it’s already being given the coveted Robert Altman award at the ceremony.
The Independent Spirit Awards airs on IFC February 21st.