Gotham Film Awards 2006
by Andre Soares
The Independent Feature Project’s 2006 Gotham Film Award nominees were announced this past Monday, Oct. 23. Among the films found in the Best Feature shortlist are three major surprises, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, (distributed by Warner Bros.), Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (distributed by Sony Pictures), and Todd Field’s Little Children (distributed by New Line Cinema). Since the IFP’s Gotham Awards are supposed to be dedicated to the promotion of independent American films, the above choices seem more than a little out of place.
More in line with the awards’ purpose are Ryan Fleck’s socio-psychological drama Half Nelson, which boasts a superb performance by (non-nominee) Ryan Gosling, and Kelly Reichardt’s Zen-like Old Joy (which cost about 1/1,000,000th of the Departed budget.)
(There’s no Best Director category. The director shares the Best Feature award with the producer. Curiously, there’s no Best Screenplay award — and no one shares any awards with the poor screenwriter unless s/he also happens to be the film’s director and/or producer.)
Among the five documentary entries are James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, Davis Guggenheim’s environmentally conscious An Inconvenient Truth, and Amy Berg’s Deliver Us from Evil, about the Catholic church’s cover-up of cases of pedophilia.
At IndieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman discusses "A Crisis for Independent Films," while at the Los Angeles Times‘ The Envelope, Tom O’Neil rants against the Gotham Awards’ non-indie choices.
A brief quote:
"But I think it’s clear how and why this happened. Foolishly, IFP handed over the selection of nominees to a gang of New York film journalists. Instead of focusing on the aims, concerns and priorities of IFP, they pushed, as usual, their own, testosterone-driven agenda. What, oh, what did they think this was — a vote of the New York Film Critics Circle?
"Even though most members of the Gotham nominating committee are not NYFCC members, they do subscribe to journos’ current groupthink, I happen to know."
The Gotham Award winners will be announced on November 29.
Full list of 2006 Gotham Film Award nominees.
THE DEPARTED (2006) - Film Review
Chicago Critics’ Scariest Films
Reeling - The 2006 Chicago Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival
Australia’s 2006 Festival of Jewish Cinema
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