Two film awards rites compared

LAWRENCE. Are her twin wins a sign of more copacetic things to come?

Quite without planning to, I did something unique and potentially instructive last month: Only a couple of days before the Oscars, I inadvertently caught the 2013 Independent Spirit Awards on the Blink channel.

Right after the Oscars, I focused on the two film awards rites on point of comparison and contrast, and came up with this “twin” analysis.

First and most obvious point: The Oscars are much bigger and glitzier than the Indie awards. —Curiously, however, the two awards had more things in common than you would initially suspect.

For one thing, they both cited “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” “Bernie” and “Amour” for excellence in various categories.

This prompts us to realize that the gap between “indie” and “maindie” is narrowing, encouraging us to hope that the day isn’t far off when more indies will make it to mainstream screens, and thus reach a much wider audience.

Female lead

This past year, that has already happened to “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Bernie.” Most specifically of all, “Silver Linings Playbook’s” female lead, Jennifer Lawrence, won both the Indie and Oscar for Best Actress! Was that a fluke—or, a sign of even more copacetic things to come?

Also notable is the fact that another indie, “Perks of Being a Wallflower” was able to hit mainstream screens last year—and it won the Indie Spirit Award for Best First Feature for Stephen Chbosky!

We hope that the Oscars will also add a Best First Feature category next year, because we need to give new filmmakers the attention and boost they deserve—and need!

Indie Spirit awards also went to “Silver Linings Playbook” for Best Feature, Wes Anderson for Best Director and Screenplay (“Moonrise Kingdom”), John Hawkes for Best Actor (“The Sessions”) and Matthew McConaughey for Supporting Actor (“Magic Mike”).

Throughout the Indie Spirit awards rites, host Andy Samberg and others kept cracking jokes about mainstream blockbusters costing hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, while indie flicks cost only “$35” to make!

That’s an exaggeration, of course, but it underscores a key difference that indie filmmakers both suffer from and are proudest of: Since it now takes so little money to make a film, the process has been liberated and “democratized” to such an extent that practically anybody can make a feature film or docu.

—So, what are we waiting for?!