"Get Out" and "Call Me By Your Name" Divvy Up the Gotham Awards

by Nathaniel R

the oldest and youngest nominee flanking the big winner: Lois Smith, Jordan Peele, and Brooklynn Prince

Get Out (with 3 wins) and Call Me By Your Name (with 2 including Best Feature) dominated the Gotham Awards last night taking the bulk of the prizes. That didn't leave much for other contenders though A24 movies The Disaster Artist and Lady Bird scored both leading acting awards. Entirely shut out despite multiple nominations: The Florida Project, Good Time, and I Tonya. More after the jump...

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"Get Out" and "Lady Bird" Lead Gotham Nominations

Awards season has begun! The first of the Oscar precursors, the Gotham Awards, has announced their nominations this morning. The Gothams are dedicated to honor the best of independent film during the last year. Their well-curated committees of film critics and movie insiders that pick the nominees result in refreshing choices that many times miss the bigger awards. Despite that, for the past three years, Gotham winners for Best Feature have gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. 

The Gotham Awards will be hosted by John Cameron Mitchell on November 27th. This year's ceremony will also award special tributes to Sofia Coppola (The Beguiled), Nicole Kidman (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Beguiled), Dustin Hoffman (The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)), Jason Blum (Get Out), Ed Lachman (Wonderstruck), and Al Gore (An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power).

Check out the nominees and update your prediction charts accordingly!

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A New Awards Group? Yup, Another One for the Indies

Over the years I realize that The Film Experience has been a bit of a killjoy in terms of one very specific development that other awards sites fawn on: the explosion of film award groups. It's just that over the years its been ridiculous to see the numbers explode but not see any correlative expansion of ideas or discussion about what constitutes great cinema. If all awards groups do is rubber stamp each other and watch the same 20 movies, we should just stick to the 3 or 4 original groups and be done with it! 

This preamble is a way of saying that when I heard there was a new Independent Film Award organization I initially rolled my eyes and shrugged it off with a tweet. Weren't The Gothams and the Spirits enough? But I've had a bit of a change of heart and am keeping an open mind after further investigation. If you're going to create a new film award, you need a purpose. And the American Independent Film Awards seems to have one. In fact, it looks like they're planning to do exactly what the Independent Spirit awards originally set out to do but have long since wandered away from as they've become a mainstream big publicity party for the mini-majors and their Oscar campaigns. The AIFA will focus on movies with budgets of $1 million or less. In other words, true indies as studios don't make films that size...  

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In Case You Missed The Gothams...

vous m'aimeChris here. Did you catch the Gotham Awards last night? The ceremony is always streams online for easy access - this year on Facebook to glitchy results. It always serves a spunky start thanks to a lack of jadedness that the just beginning season will bring and the idiosyncratic results from separately juried categories.

However, this year those juries were almost unanimous in their love for Barry Jenkins's Moonlight...

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The Gotham Nominations

Chris here. In case you missed it, the season's first precursor nominations were announced on Thursday: the Gothams! Somewhat like the New York City community's answer to the Indie Spirit Awards, the Gothams never fail to highlight some spunkier names thanks to each category being voted on by separate committees. Spotlight may have taken their big prize as well as Oscar last year, but it's the rare Gotham's win to continue on to Oscar.

The year's biggest nominee is Manchester By The Sea (which Nathaniel just reviewed) with four nominations. However, the biggest celebration is likely being had by A24: the New York-based distributor scored nominations for seven of their films, including lesser seen worthy titles like Krisha and Morris From America. This year's ceremony will also feature tributes to Amy Adams, Ethan Hawke, Arnon Milchan, and Oliver Stone.

BEST FEATURE

• Certain Women
• Everybody Wants Some!!
• Manchester By The Sea
• Moonlight
• Paterson

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