Last week, the nominees for the 2009 Spirit Awards were announced. The Spirit Awards, meant to be the indie version of the Oscars, has caused a bit of an uproar with the recently changed rules of eligibility. Now, the qualifying criteria includes a budget below twenty million dollars. That is a surprisingly high budget, and more or less guarantees a lot of overlap with Oscar nominees. Such as: two of the five best-picture nominees are “Rachel Getting Married” and “The Wrestler”; “Synecdoche, New York” is a nominee for best first feature and best screenplay; “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” “Milk,” and “Rachel” were nominated for their screenplays, too; and among the nominated actors and actresses are Anne Hathaway, Javier Bardem, and Sean Penn.
Synecdoche, New York was nominated for a 2009 Spirit Award.
Meanwhile, worthy independent films such as “Frownland” and “Nights and Weekends” have been overlooked in favor of bigger budgeted films. The independent filmmaking spirit is not all about dollars, but the amount of overlap between the Oscars and the Spirit Awards raises the question–how do we define an independent film now?
The 2009 Spirit Awards will be presented February 21, 2009. Find out more about them here.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.