"On Saturday afternoon, the Independent Spirit Awards took place in Hollywood. Not on the beach in Santa Monica, where the white tent and ocean air made the ceremony feel like a scrappy, sunlit Oscar alternative, but inside the dark and historic Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard.The official explanation was logistics. With the 2028 Olympics coming to Los Angeles, the beach was unavailable.That may be true, but watching the ceremony made it hard to escape another conclusion."
"I kept thinking about the Spirit Awards back in 1999, when Ally Sheedy won Best Actress for "High Art" and gave a fantastically unhinged 10-minute acceptance speech: "Everyone's been really quick, I'm not gonna be quick. I've never been nominated for anything before, this may never happen again, I'm takin' my fucking time."Nearly three decades later, the show struggled to generate the sense that something larger was unfolding around it."
Independent Spirit Awards moved from a beach setting in Santa Monica to the Hollywood Palladium due to 2028 Olympics logistics. Several high-profile nominees and winners were absent, acceptance speeches were swift and uneventful, and the host was unable to overcome a muted atmosphere. The contrast with Ally Sheedy's unhinged 1999 acceptance highlights a diminished sense of occasion. For decades Sundance, the Spirit Awards, and the festival ecosystem served as independent film’s coordination layer, launching careers, facilitating deals, and conferring reputations. Festivals still offer concentrated attention for limited periods, but that coordinating cultural gravity appears to be shifting.
Read at IndieWire
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]