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The Myth of the Alt-Oscars

The Independent Spirit Awards and the BAFTAS are often thought of as hip alternatives to the Oscars. But are they really all that better?

My first experience with the Independent Spirit Awards was in 1997, when the comely Serena Altschul of MTV News interrupted my daily video-watching to report that this edgy alternative to the Oscars had nominated Queen Latifah for Best Supporting Actress for her revelatory performance as Cleo Sims in the underrated female action drama Set It Off. To a budding cinephile who had seen my beloved Pulp Fiction deprived of its Oscar glory by the boomer nostalgia of Forrest Gump two years earlier and modern classics like Heat, Seven and Casino ignored as the mind-numbingly boring Braveheart took the gold the year before, this renegade awards show seemed like a dream come true. I imagined that the voters were all New York City video store clerks with horn-rimmed glasses who had written books on Abel Ferrara and stood in line to see Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka.

That year Fargo took the top prize at the Independent Spirit Awards and The English Patient won the Best Picture Oscar, a decision that seemed ridiculous at the time but with 13 years of hindsight is somewhat akin to Beyonce winning Best Actress over Meryl Streep or Kevin Costner winning Best Director over Ingmar Bergman. I did a little more investigating and found that the Independent Spirit Awards got it right on several occasions when the Oscars were laughably wrong. Where the Oscars showered praise on middlebrow awards bait like Out of Africa, Rain Man and Driving Miss Daisy, the Independent Spirit Awards gave their top prizes to offbeat gems like After Hours, River’s Edge and The Player. I bid adieu to the Oscars with a petulant “Screw you, old man!” and adopted the Independent Spirit Awards as my new movie awards show of record.

The next year everyone in the world caught Titanic fever. Unlike most film snobs, I actually liked that overstuffed spectacle, but my horse in that race was Curtis Hanson’s dark, stylish L.A. Confidential (I even started wearing blazers to my high school in rural Georgia so I’d look all mysterious). As I watched James Cameron attend coronation after coronation that year, I joined the growing backlash who just wanted something, anything to halt this raving madman’s Hitler-like march through the Shrine Auditorium’s Sudetenland (a position I find myself in again this year). Of course, Cameron laid waste to the Academy Awards that year, winning an unprecedented 4,295 Oscars.

I was happy to learn, though, that The Apostle, Robert Duvall’s raw and brilliant examination of faith, had taken top honors at the Independent Spirit Awards, and the UK’s British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards named The Full Monty their Best Film, perhaps the only award of consequence Titanic didn’t win that year. I wasn’t a big fan of The Full Monty, but I loved the fact that a scrappy little movie about steel worker strippers had vanquished the most expensive film of all time. I read a little more about the BAFTAs and saw that, like the Independent Spirit Awards, they’d awarded many great films that were treated like red-headed stepchildren by the Oscars: GoodFellas, The Elephant Man, Dr. Strangelove. Sure, they’d made their share of wacky decisions — The Commitments over Silence Of The Lambs??? — but they were just crazy Brits! The wankers! I had another trusted awards show.

Over the past decade, though, the BAFTAs and the Independent Spirit Awards have become every bit as boring, predictable and shallow as the Oscars. The BAFTAs still have good years here and there, getting it right where Oscar went wrong with Brokeback Mountain over Crash, The Aviator over Million Dollar Baby (which wasn’t even nominated), and perhaps this year with The Hurt Locker over Avatar. But more often than not, they’re the same conventional wisdom zombies as the Oscars, celebrating mediocrity like Slumdog Millionaire, The Last King of Scotland and Gladiator. Plus, have you ever watched the BAFTAs? I promise you that you will never again question whether the Oscars are an entertaining TV program if you watch a single BAFTAs. This year, host Jonathan Ross delivered a sub-Leno monologue in front of the giant word “FILM” before throwing to a Transformers 2 montage set to “Killing In The Name”.

Sadly, that’s nothing compared to the hollow shell that the Independent Spirit Awards have become. With only one exception, since 2004 their Best Film has been the latest show pony put forth by Fox Searchlight, an indie/major hybrid with a bottomless awards campaign budget that no other indie distributor can hope to match. This isn’t necessarily a problem when something as good as The Wrestler or Sideways takes the gold, but what about when treacle like Little Miss Sunshine wins over the modern classic Pan’s Labyrinth or… ugh… Juno wins over a masterpiece like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Adding insult to injury, those back-to-back travesties happened in years when the Oscars somehow got it right, awarding The Departed and No Country For Old Men, respectively, giving the Independent Spirit Awards the once-unimaginable indignity of being less cool than the limp, lifeless, Ron Howard-loving Oscars. The Fox Searchlight streak will probably continue this year with the annoying hipster trash 500 Days Of Summer taking top honors, though it’s being challenged by the very worthy Precious (thanks to the Oprah/Tyler Perry publicity machine).

So now, awards are meaningless. To me. At this point in my life. Just as I don’t understand why Conan O’Brien made it his life goal to acquire The Tonight Show, a program that Louis CK memorably referred to as “some old, shitty thing”, I don’t understand why Martin Scorsese cares that some faceless group gives him a statuette when he’s directed Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours and GoodFellas without getting one (let’s not forget that Oscar ignored Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, and countless other geniuses). But that man wanted an Oscar, dammit, and it felt great to see him get one. After contributing unparalleled greatness to film decade after decade, I’d probably crave the recognition of my peers, too. Despite all the mistakes the Academy has made over the years, a great film artist winning an Oscar still means something, as evidenced by this year’s outpouring of support for Jeff Bridges, one of the best actors of his generation and a longtime Oscar loser. I don’t see anybody clamoring about his potentially winning an Independent Spirit Award. The 90′s allure of the alt-Oscars is gone, but even at their height they never held the significance of a well-deserved win of the real thing.

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  • http://twitter.com/pts pts

    I'll admit I have a couple of problems with some details here, though I certainly agree with the sweep of your argument: Films whose greatness we feel is completely self-evident, whose messages have realigned our perception of the world in the space of two miraculous hours, get ignored by the people who by all rights should be most aware of their virtues, and it's deeply frustrating.

    That said, what do you have against Little Miss Sunshine? If your criticism involves the words “indie,” “hipster,” or “ironic,” I'm not sure I can take it seriously. If a genuine, heartfelt film about a fucked-up family that manages to work around their own up-fucked-ness to embrace each other when the world pisses on them is “treacle,” then, garçon? More treacle, and be quick about it.

    And if you separate Juno from the extra-narrative things about it that bother you so much, it really is a genuinely good movie, with good performances, relatable human characters, and touchingly unconventional love story. I don't really care if the lady that wrote it annoys you, that doesn't make the film itself any less good.

    All that said, I'm glad we agree on 500 Days of Summer. I thought I liked that film, at first, but the more I thought about it, the more my mild amusement turned to ambivalence, then frustration, then open loathing. And I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Ugh.

  • http://www.sodapopjournal.com/ Scott Howard

    Actually, I'm writing more about the awards ceremonies than the films here. Both are viewed as hipper alternatives to the dated, out-of-touch Oscars, and one usually agrees with them while the other has essentially become a corporate shill for a multinational corporation when it presents itself as the voice of independent film.

    On the point of the films though, I think Little Miss Sunshine is cute but slight and Juno is annoying and awful. Neither is in the same league as Pan's Labyrinth, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Departed or No Country For Old Men.

  • http://sodapopjournal.com Robert Cortez

    I wouldn't call Little Miss Sunshine the movie of the year (and I don't think that was the point) but I'm with Paul that it's a great little movie about family and some of society's weirder tendencies.

    And I know you'll both hate me for saying it, but it's a damn sight more charming and entertaining that Pan's Labyrinth.

  • http://www.sodapopjournal.com/ Scott Howard

    Yes, I definitely agree that the cutesy family comedy is more charming than the surrealist meditation on fascism and child murder.

  • http://twitter.com/pts pts

    I suppose my problem is that I have a fundamental problem with a thesis that a movie has to be deep, heavy, and/or dark in order to be profound. Human truth does not always dress in black and carry a cattle stunner; sometimes it wears a hoodie and talks on a hamburger phone.

    But in any case, your observations about the awards themselves are very astute, particularly about the mixed bag that Fox Searchlight represents for independent film.

    (I can't hate on BAFTA too much, though; so far they're the only organization that has given Moon the awards attention it deserves.)

  • http://twitter.com/pts pts

    Oh and one more thing: The idea of teenaged Scott Howard wearing a blazer in high school in order to look more mysterious is killing me with how awesome it is.

    You were much cooler than me, Howard. I wore a fedora and Dr. Who scarf. (I wish I were joking even a little bit.)

  • http://sodapopjournal.com Robert Cortez

    On Juno, I shouldn't have to ignore a signficant portion of the movie (and supposedly what made it such hot shit) to actually enjoy it, should I? Somehow that seems like the opposite of a “genuinely good movie”.

    That's not to say I didn't like some of it—I thought the Jason Bateman/Jennifer Garner bits were the best—but it's only so-so film, and ultimately, one that I think could've been dismissed entirely if it weren't for the media attention that buzzed around its writer.

  • http://www.sodapopjournal.com/ Scott Howard

    I agree with that, Paul. I think we all appreciate pop over prog rock. But on the subject of these awards shows/ceremonies, the victory of Little Miss Sunshine and Juno at the Independent Spirit Awards had a lot more to do with campaigning and Murdoch money than the quality of the films themselves (and I'd extend that to Sideways and The Wrestler, the two Fox Searchlight films I liked that I cited). And really, I don't mean to bash them as a company. As the only indie distributor with money to spend, they've done a lot of good keeping films like Slumdog Millionaire and Crazy Heart from going straight to DVD and getting them to audiences that have loved them. It just makes me sad that the “indie awards show” is now so damned corporate.

  • http://www.sodapopjournal.com/ Scott Howard

    I'm glad that lots of people liked Juno. Far be it from me to deprive someone of joy in this mean, cold world. But it ain't close to being the best movie of that year. This is the same year as Children of Men. Of Pan's Labyinth. The Prestige. Little Children.

    To quote Pulp Fiction, it ain't the same ballpark, ain't the same league, ain't even the same fuckin' sport.

  • http://www.sodapopjournal.com/ Scott Howard

    My friend, it sounds kindasorta cool now, but it was not in any way cool at the time. I had exactly two blazers: a frayed, ill-fitting blue one that I found at a thrift store and a black 80's one from my mom's closet that I cut the shoulder pads out of. Sad. In college my blazer-wearing got a little better as I found a cheap tailor who could get my thrift store finds looking pretty good. Sadly, no blazers have been worn here in Houston as it's too damned hot.

  • http://twitter.com/pts pts

    Ah, but the very fact that it wasn't cool at the time is what makes it so great.

    You're a good man, sir.

  • http://twitter.com/TheArmandoShow Armando

    Do I think Juno was a wonderful masterpiece of filmaking? No. Did I enjoy the tone of the story/dialogue, the “quirky” characters and their interactions? Sure.

    I like Juno because I can relate to it's (whether it's pretentious/fake/sugary sweet, whatever) supposed quirkiness.

    Is it the be all end all? Of course not.

    But admittedly, I enjoy anything made in that vein.

  • http://twitter.com/TheArmandoShow Armando

    By the way, very good post and thoughts PTS.